#1: Are you going to guarantee that another webkit browser will have the exact behavior of Safari, in all respects?

#2: You sound like you're assuming that there's a "perfectly good Mac" available, when the earlier AC was complaining about having to pay Apple for hardware to test their software on. I'd assume that in their perfect world, they're running a licensed copy of OSX in a virtualized environment on a Windows or Linux machine.

My company's purpose is to virtualize the OS for development; we don't care about Safari itself, but in the case that we did, there isn't any (legal) way to test it without purchasing Apple hardware.

By their licensing terms, OSX can only be run on "Apple-branded hardware", or words to that effect. My employer virtualizes OSX, but they do it on a old Apple Xserve from about 2009. There arentt any other rackmount options available that I know of.

If the kid's skilled enough to make a game, then surely whoever paid for the computer would recognize that and pay for something worthwhile like a game engine subscription, rather than something frivolous like an mmorpg subscription. And if not? Well, life's not always fair, and this would provide an excellent example of that. The company's got to make money, and there are plenty of free alternatives that the kid could start with anyhow.

If OP is gaming, they're more likely to use a wired device than a wireless one. I've never liked wireless devices, myself.

...Haven't we covered this already? Is there some downside to using a phone? You talk about it like it's a bad idea. As for the iPod Touch, it's been about 5 years since one was released that could be used without iTunes. If I didn't have a smartphone, I'd use my $20 MP3 player. Smaller+lighter than even a small touchscreen device, cheaper to replace, takes microSD for memory expansion (and thus has more space than my 1st gen iPod Touch, anyhow), and it's too small to break if dropped.

Unless you've bought into the Apple app ecosystem, there are better options than an iPod from any angle. Music player, mini-tablet/personal media device, etc.

Ah, I wasn't aware that the stock firmwares for all of them included support. What I understood was that they were all from product lines that I've heard of and know people that own them (using "well-advertised" and anecdotal evidence as a heuristic for "fairly popular") and that the maintainers of the app had to reverse-engineer support for the hardware. On the latter point, I didn't really know *why* they had to do that, and I appreciate the more knowledgeable perspective.

Even if they aren't familiar with exactly how far a mile is, they know that it's a unit of distance used in similar situations to kilometers. It's reasonable to expect that the meaning of the saying wouldn't be lost on them.

Because most people really don't give a flip about whether a system is open or not. A small percentage of a small percentage is worth ignoring for large companies.

Any phone that matches the iPod Touch's specs will be in a similar (or lower) price range at this point. Its lower screen resolution and size, non-expandable memory, single camera, and aging CPU point to a budget phone. Something like a 2nd-generation Motorola Moto G kills it in every spec besides on-device storage, and it has a MicroSD slot to help take care of that. It's available new for $180, directly from Moto. Do you have more requirements that you haven't mentioned? Or are you just trying to be difficult?

It's apparently part of the bluetooth module in a lot of phones, rather than the cellular radio..

This is generally accomplished by using headphone wires as antennae.

Hardware-level support for FM is apparently present for some fairly popular devices, but not activated in software. I don't think that the difficulties (power requirements, technical difficulty of implementation, etc) are as serious as you're making them out to be.

AC, Americans don't say "representative to" (or at least they don't in any part of the country I've ever lived in). It sounds unnatural. I would assume that the previous AC either made a typo or isn't a native speaker of English.

What does "deserve" have to do with business decisions? Someone who isn't willing to pay for a product+service that's available doesn't necessarily deserve to have an alternative that fits there need better. If there's no workable business case for it, it won't happen.

And what does paying for a cellular plan have to do with buying a smartphone, anyhow? There's plenty of capable hardware available off-contract. My last two smartphones see some limited use as PDA-like devices, and my current phone. Sometimes you make some good points. This doesn't look like one of those times.

I think that there are a few problems that people have with your statements, and it doesn't have anything to do with whether they're true or not.

First, that bit that I quoted is a logical fallacy usually called Argument from Authority.

Second, you are making a lot of claims without providing evidence. Since you are making the claims, the burden of proof falls on you; you don't get to dismiss the counterarguments that others have posted (often with backing evidence, like links to studies and papers) since you haven't provided anything to counter them aside from unsupported assertions.

I think we do. Part of the point is that it's wonderfully easy to link to information, since you seem to have it available in abundance. Personally, I'm completely ignorant of the Seattle area. I'm sure that I could find some kind of information about the situation up there, since I'm fairly handy with a search engine; I don't know if it would reflect reality though, or if I'd just find the mouthpiece of someone with an agenda besides truth.

Just for the sake of being clear though: I don't think you're trying to persuade anyone of anything. I think you're just trying to make a lot of noise and see how many people you can hook with a troll line. Congrats; you seem to have a good catch.

I saw something similar happen at my employer. A newer employee was sent on a mostly solo project to rewrite some of the core of our product, to make it easier to make some planned enhancements. Things didn't immediately work perfectly, and some of the founding employees fought the changes. Since they were necessary for the next release, and there wasn't another option for the features that we were required to make available, we ended up with two parallel sections of code that did basically the same thing but in very different ways. That was what we put up with for 4 or 5 *years* before the politics of the situation allowed us to integrate the changes back into a single codepath.
Before that, if you didn't touch that code constantly, it was usually unclear which path was being actively used and which was bitrotted to uselessness.

True enough. A Raspberry Pi, ODroid, or any other super-cheap computer is "just a computer". Except that it's also a computer that a kid could tinker around on without making a more serious computer unusable, and it's easier to use it to talk to other electronics, sensors, etc than a PC-style computer. It works well as a kind of compromise between a more expensive computer and a microcontroller. It doesn't do either job as well, but it's more flexible.