How about: "Well, we haven't seen any product announcements from Apple yet. We're very interested in seeing what they may come up with due to their track record of making incredible technology easy to use, but in the meantime we're going to continue shipping a product that 12 million customers enjoy every day."

That's what he should have said.

Except that Apple is the one company that managed to convince both the RIAA and the MPAA that digital distribution is a good idea, and signed them. Oh, and NBC, CBS, and ABC.

Cracking those nuts is way harder than ESPN and Discovery. You get those two networks, the rest will play ball.

God, I'd hate to have a product that I've sold millions of units of, with accelerating volume. What a failure.

Note: AppleTV is not just the iTunes video rentals / store. AppleTV does more than that.

So you would say that Windows 95 and Windows 7 are the same OS? After all, they're only different versions. Mac OS X 10.3 (PowerPC 32-bit) and Mac OS X 10.8 (x86-64) are clearly the same, as they are only different versions. Never mind that there is zero application compatibility between the two since Rosetta is gone...

Your statement is ridiculous.

The question behind "depending" goes even further. Off the top of my head:

iOS 5 on iPhone / iPad / AppleTV 2
Mac OS X 10.7 on MacBook Air
Mac OS X 10.8 DP3 on Mac Pro test box
Windows 7 SP1 on Lenovo x220
??? on BMW iDrive controller in my car
FreeBSD on NAS device
various servers on the Internet (Windows, UNIX, Linux, etc.)
various embedded OS versions on consumer electronics devices (HDTV, digital receiver, etc.)

The world runs on software, whether you know it or not.

My cable box is a piece of shit, and I want to put a big gaping hole through it with a .12ga slug.

That being said, the company I work for is HP's largest thin client customer. In certain situations (retail) thin clients are great. For general purpose use (offices), a more flexible solution is necessary - we use standardized OEM PCs and laptop models with our custom Windows image.

Because there's never any issues with user accounts, authentication, VPN connections, VDI agent installation, servers, network, etc.

The modern support center does call routing in addition to simple break / fix support. If they can't fix it, they can escalate it to those who can. That function will still be necessary.

... colocation facilities in New Jersey and Connecticut see a rise in business.

Do these idiots know that electrons don't care about state boundaries?

Note that I'm coming from a place where I don't know much about how digital cable systems work, but I'm curious:

What effect would it have on the cable system to convert all available frequencies for use on an IP network, and deliver the channel that you're watching via video-over-IP, rather than having a discrete data "channel" and delivering lots of channels of video simultaneously that you're not watching?

It seems that for the cost of a bit of channel-changing delay, they could harvest a shedload of bandwidth. Unless they've already done this with digital cable systems, then I guess I'm just catching up.

What if he wants them cooked with hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide?