They design, they don't fab. Just like PA Semi which Apple bought earlier. Apple designs products and product components but then outsources their manufacture. They aren't interested (so far) in owning fabrication plants. They can be more agile if they can switch manufacturers as their requirements change.

I was gonna say. I find that my bug productivity - buggery, you might call it - goes way up in these months. They are great months for writing buggy code.

That is the origin of Mitt's thinking, yes. It's the single worst decision they ever made in that it creates a grave threat to personal freedom and the healthy functioning of democracy. The fact that a few managers, not shareholders, can take money invested for an economic enterprise and spend it on their political agenda without their consent is appalling. As a shareholder, I've never been asked for or given consent to any political spending.

Because "corporations are people too". (Mitt Romney)

Your home brew is not a product from Dell or HP is it? You built it yourself. Hardly a comparison. I was comparing Apple to other computer manufacturers. If your labor is free (to you) and you are crafty and able to get the parts at good prices you can do better especially when you start loading up the upgrades. You won't have support of course. You'll be assuming the risk that some parts won't play well with other, drivers etc. The labor, risk and lack of support are costs too though different people value them differently. Most people aren't computer nerds so they won't want to take the same path as you. Tell me, can you build a laptop with 6 hours of battery life and all the other specs including weight and form factor of a Macbook Air or do you think that a plastic box with a monitor attached is the same thing?

No Apple product is half as good as anything from HP, Dell, IBM or Sony (though IBM doesn't make PCs anymore). Apple products are at least twice as good as products from these companies that are intended to compete with theirs.

You are confusing a market with a market economy. "Market economy" is a term used in the field of economics. It actually means something fairly specific though it applies a broad range of economies with widely varying degrees of government involvement. The term "market" refers to the relative importance of the market, i.e. the private sector versus government in controlling investments. Its a more useful description than "capitalist" or "capitalism". By your logic one would argue that all economies are are capitalist because you must have capital in order to have an economy.

You are confusing socialism with totalitarianism. There are democratic socialist countries. I prefer a market economy myself and I agree that government control of the economy inherently limits the potential freedom of its citizens, but so do oligarchies and cartels. It is possible to have a market economy under an authoritarian regime as well. The combination of a representative government and a market economy has the greatest potential to maximize freedom, but that depends on so many conditions its almost theoretical.

The press loves to get people all worked up about data mining. Data mining itself is not an invasion of privacy. At that point you are just an anonymous set of attributes. The purpose of data mining is to understand and discover the relationships that exist among different data. It's an analysis performed on a large body of data from a large population or it doesn't work. Your personal identity is not important or useful for its purpose. Targeted advertising isn't an invasion either even if it uses information you've provided along with relationships discovered in data mining to try to put something in front of you that you may be interested in. That's actually a service. Facebook or Google are capable of providing targeted ads without providing your information to the advertisers or any other third party. The merely need to match the ads they display on your page to your characteristics. Do you think Google shares your gmail e-mails with others in order to target advertising to you based on an email's content? An invasion of privacy happens when without your permission the information you've entered is sold or given to others to use. That is what should require an "opt in" from the user. That isn't an internet specific thing either. Every company or institution that collects information from you as part of a transaction should be so restricted.

Get a better codec then!