Frankly, I'd like it to be more like the crop of data acquiring bands that we see right now with a small time display, and that's it. I'd like it to capture a lot of health data (HR, distance travelled, etc.) and it should sync with my ANT+ bike equipment (cadence monitor, speed, power, everything) and act as a proxy to my phone and feed my phone data.

Look, the phone is the thing with the screen that you actually want to look at. A watch face is too small for anything except small bites of information except the time and the date. The new Withings Activite watch actually looks pretty good; no digital display at all. The battery lasts a year. It tells you if you're meeting your daily goals and basically nothing else. But it captures data. THAT'S useful.

I'm never going to read email on my watch that's coming from my phone; how could that possibly make any sense? MAYBE I wouldn't mind a sort of morse code vibration to it that tells me if I got a notification by text, mail or other.

Part of the problem with the current crop of smart watches is they haven't thought about what kind of information is appropriate to display on a screen that small. A watch is meant to be GLANCED at, not stared at. Information has to come in digestible, atomic chunks. We can process the relative position of two arms on the face very quickly, but an email or text requires a few seconds of reading, particularly if the font is small or the words have been forced to be wrapped.

We need to rethink data display before we can make use of these devices. Right now, it's the wrong data for the form factor.

See, this is what I thought as well. The Higgs was well predicted and made sense in the standard model, and our measurements at the LHC seem to back up what physicists were speculating. On the other hand, BICEP2 is a much newer result and there's considerable controversy about whether it's a real result or a mistake.

So why would you automatically jump to the conclusion that the HIGGS was the problem? You've already got the other half of the equation under review. Shouldn't we wait to see if the BICEP2 results make any sense first?

I suppose from a theoretical point of view, it makes sense to resolve these conflicts ahead of time, but given this apparent contradiction, doesn't it seem even more likely that the BICEP2 results are probably wrong? I would say this is another signal that the observations aren't what they thought they were.

It is not, and has never been, a democracy. It's a Constitutional Republic. As far as I know, there's no such thing as a true democracy in the world. 50% + 1 doesn't exist in Western society, and for good reason. It's the fact that we theoretically elect skilled and educated representatives (ha!) to understand the complexities and repercussions of things that countries DON'T have an FBEA.

But aside from that, I agree with you.

No, that's not what I'm saying. Apple is out there to make money, and I said they will when they can, but Google is simply not making money if you don't give useful information to them so they can advertise to you. Samsung makes money on the S5 they sell you, but Google doesn't make much, if anything. The Nexus 5 is so heavily subsidised I'm sure it's not really making a profit if you turn off internet access on it, but most people don't want to buy a device like that so it can NOT connect to the internet.

So it comes down to who has the incentive to take your information and do something with it. Apple? Not really. They've got some money, and they'll make a bit more on the app store, but the app store is probably has a smaller margin than the hardware. (It's effectively just a way to make something mildly profitable that gets you to buy the DEVICE, not the other way around.)

Samsung has less of a dog in this hunt, too. They use Android to give them broad-based appeal, but they make money on the phone. If you buy the phone from them and toss it in the drawer, I'm pretty sure they don't care. They're already on the way to the bank.

Google is the only one that isn't asking for your money because they want the information that makes YOU valuable.

Apple and Samsung are less likely to want your data because frankly, getting useful data is kind of hard. Google is big and they've got infrastructure in place to deal with it; realistically, they're one of the only companies that can really turn your data into good money.

This problem is as old as manufacturing.
Do we really not know or fail to remember that this is how the entire Japanese electronics and automotive industries were spawned? This is how the electronic industry of Korea came about, and one third of the entire Soviet Union's compute capacity from 1950 to 1990. Not to mention the entire DECSYSTEM-20 compatibles market and all the AMD, Cyrix, IBM, NexGen, WinChip, RISE, etc. x86-compatibles market.

I'm sure someone has already or will soon point out how this is newsworthy.

Apple doesn't care as much about profit after the fact because they got 45% off of you as soon as you bought their phone.

Even if you turn off every function on your phone--including the phone--and kept it in airplane mode the whole time like some sort of absurdly expensive iPod, Apple already made a profit.

Apple cares about your privacy insofar as it allows them to put a bullet-point on the box that they can use to distinguish themselves from Google's model. Google needs information to make a profit. They make virtually no money off of Android itself; that's why buying a Nexus is so cheap.

Essentially, Apple can afford to be stingy with information, and can afford for YOU to be stingy with YOUR information. Google can't.

I'm sure Apple will turn your information into profit if it can, don't get me wrong. But it's not their primary business model. As long as the phone costs a lot of money, you can count on them being less interested in what you have to offer after the sale.

The users that know about this kind of security and understand it are already the kind of people that this false sense of security doesn't work on. The people that aren't aware of this, or that don't understand it when you tell them are the people that are protected--they have no idea that they need to do anything, and couldn't even if they did know. Their false sense of security comes from not knowing that they need to protect themselves at all.

Increasing their security has knock-on benefits for the rest of us.

Ahem. It's Forrest Mims III to you.

This is why he's deliberately blurring that 'by mistake' and 'by accident' line. It's a bit of a subtle joke.

How are they locking you in, exactly? If the functionality doesn't exist on another platform, it doesn't exist on another platform. That's not Apple's fault. Media is pretty transferable. If you're talking about apps and the sunk cost of purchases, that's true no matter what platform you're moving from.

Apple doesn't control enough of my data to really lock me in, and it looks like people can move pretty freely from Apple to Android (and vice versa)--many Android users tout that ease of movement as a reason to move away from Apple, in fact.

That hardly seems fair. You can jailbreak your phone and modify the functionality of iOS, too. Cyanogen isn't what most people will have on their phone or even something that they really have available to them at their skill level. The only people that I know that talk about Cyanogen are programmers or people on Slashdot. It's not an oranges to oranges comparison.

Your anecdote doesn't really mean much. Apple has much better retention than other companies, and when you look at buying intention or people who have switched, the numbers do come out on Apple's side. It's nice that you and your wife have found things that work for you. When I borrowed a Nexus 4 for a week, I had to struggle to make it a week before I went back to my iPhone 4. I just couldn't find anything particularly redeeming about Android phones that I didn't get from my iPhone (other than the speed of a new phone, obviously, but any new phone would give me that; and the price).

You're assuming he means that they purchased the phones 'by accident' rather than what he probably intended, which is that they later had buyer's remorse and felt they'd made a mistake. He's deliberately blurring the meaning here, but he's almost certainly not claiming that people went home with phones and didn't realise until later that they weren't made by Apple.

Tim Cook is clearly trying to get across that he feels that these people bought these phones and then realised the error of their ways, not that they walked into stores, put money down, and only realised when they got home that they had Android phones instead of iPhones.

The distinction in this case is subtle because 'by mistake' usually does mean 'by accident', or 'unintentionally'. He's TRYING to be subtle here because he's almost certainly trying to make an allusion to their court cases and how Samsung made phones that really did look like iPhones for a while.