Every time I've done prints at local store, the color has been awful. Sometimes the image itself turns grainy. The prints I order through iPhoto are wonderful, though I haven't ordered in a few months. I believe they were using Kodak's service, which is getting handed over to Shutterfly?

Apple is pretty predictable -- once they've started showing their hand. They consistently take successful ideas used in one place and expand them as far as possible. Successful user interface paradigms developed for one application later appear in others. The iOS App Store begat the Mac App Store. So it seems pretty obvious that Apple, having introduced Siri, will expand it.

Except for major OS releases to paid developer program members, Apple almost never releases anything with a "beta" label. Siri is labeled a beta, which surely is meant to indicate that more functionality is planned.

Let's say you have to design a connector for a device which is relatively thin, and is expected to get thinner in the future. Existing common connection standards like USB don't provide the functionality you want. What's the most obvious shape? How about a flat line?

Wow, amazing work. I don't think there's much inspiration required.

Apple's products are hardware-software bundles. Apple sometimes sells updated software to use on hardware you already bought from them. They also are a vendor of content -- none of which they create -- with the goal of making their hardware-software bundles even more appealing.

Stupid exceptions that don't change my argument:
  FileMaker (a mostly-ignored Apple subsidiary)
  You can use iTunes on Windows to purchase music & video and never put them on an Apple device. This wasn't the goal of the iTunes Music Store, and doesn't make much money for Apple.
  The legions of 3rd-party products Apple sells online and at their stores have nothing to do with this.

I've had a nytimes.com login pretty much since they started requiring registration to view stories -- late 90s some time? Right after the paywall was announced, I got an email thanking me for being a long-time account holder and offering me a free year's subscription. I took their offer, of course. How many of those 100,000 subscribers are actually paying?

My wife got an email from TiVo, and I got an email from some branch of Disney vacation sales (no surprise -- we took a trip to DisneyWorld like 5 years ago and they still have my email address).

This is affecting a lot of companies.

That works if and only if Apple tells everyone that's what they're doing. While it may be likely based on past experience, you cannot safely assume a company will do anything in particular.

Innovation often doesn't come from the big guys. Experience so far with the App Store has certainly shown that. There's no good reason for Apple to only look at large publishing operations for input.

The ridiculous part is that they're still charging a fee to enable tethering. That sort of makes sense with an "unlimited" plan. Presumably, the plan price was based on an estimate of how much data you'd use. Since tethering will obviously drive up usage, that assumption is no longer valid. (This highlights the absurdity of so-called "unlimited" plans that aren't really.)

But now that you are paying for actual use, there's no excuse to charge anything for tethering. You've paid for 2 GB (or whatever), and it shouldn't matter how it gets used. If you use more, you pay more.

I'd really like to see a regulatory authority question that charge.

If you actually read the AT&T press release you'll find that this applies to all smartphone data plans. It's not just about iPhones. They're basically changing the iPad plans to match.

As of right now, Apple's iPad product page still refers to unlimited data plans. It's hard to imagine AT&T didn't notify Apple that this is coming, but it almost looks like they don't know.