Sure, and that's exactly what web sites do now with browser cookies. So there's really nothing new to worry about.

Let's focus on the real evil behavior, such as apps scooping up users' address books. That needs to be stopped.

The analysis was great. They used some very clever techniques, and wrote it up thoroughly.

The reporting is absurdly overhyped, with statements like "one in five of the free apps in Apple's app store upload private data back to the apps' creators " Almost all of the "privacy leaking" was simply apps capturing device ID's (UDID), which is routine piece of data collected for issue resolution, and isn't "privacy" any more than a web server logging your IP address is violating your privacy. If you're worried about that, you probably should change your IP address every day, and disable browser cookies. A few apps ask for location data (which requires user acceptance) and send it to the server, which is under user control so isn't "leaking".

The only "bad" apps that they found were a "few cases in which the address book, the browser history, and the photo gallery is leaked." Those are (at least potentially) evil. They found 5 in iUS and 4 in Cydia, which was well under 1% of the apps checked. Those apps should be "outed" so that people can at least make an informed decision about whether there's a good need for that kind of data access.

Remember, the code of Mac OS X was NeXTSTEP, which ran on a wide range of CPUs (MIPS, 680x0, x86, SPARC, HP PA RISC). Mac OS X _always_ ran on x86. Mac OS X has always made multi-architecture support easy - resources are all portable, and for developers it's only a check box, which defaults to being checked. And given that iOS runs on ARM, and it's the same compiler and naerly the same code and dev tools, it's a safe bet that Mac OS X could be running on ARM fairly easily. I could see a really smart intern pulling that off.

The only hard part would be getting developers to recompile their apps, and for users to install the new versions. Given that a few people complained about Apple dropping PPC emulation last year, after 7 years of warnings, there are clearly some long-abandoned apps out there that at least a few people still run.

After running a MacBook AIR (and loving it) I'm not sure that it would benefit much from moving to ARM. Longer battery life (or smaller battery) is good, of course, but more power is consumed by the display than the CPU. And the ARM is fairly slow, compared even to the CPUs in the MacBook AIR. Of course, if the next generation ARM were dramatically faster, I don't think anyone would complain about faster and longer battery life.

Weirdly, the biggest impact would probably be the price - ARM chips cost much, much less than x86 chips. They're much smaller/simpler, so cost less to make, and ARM sells mainly to embedded/consumer electronics device manufacturers, who are extremely price sensitive, much more so than PC manufacturers. So going from x86 to ARM could drop Apple's costs significantly. Woot!

Interesting argument, but usually in Mac OS X apps the resources are much larger than the executable binaries, and the resources are reused on all platforms, so the overhead for the extra binaries in downloads (and install CD's, if anyone uses them) isn't too bad. The installer can strip out the binaries that are unneeded, saving your local disk space, if you want.

Exactly. This extreme portability is all inherited from NeXTSTEP, which ran native on 680x0, x86, HP PA RISC, PowerPC, and SPARC. Rumor has it that while Apple doesn't ship for all of those OSs, they keep the builds working across all of those CPUs in order to make sure that they don't break portability, keeping their options open for the future.

Given that, I think that you are right - adding more architectures basically means using the existing compiler and adding the back-end to generate the new CPU's binaries, and recompiling everything.

I'd argue that it _is_ Siri, but indirectly. That is, Siri is efficient, but it improves the usability of web services. By making it easier to look up directions, check flights, etc., it increases usage, leading users to consume more data. That's a good thing, not a bad thing.

The 4S is selling in volumes that are hard to think are just early adopters.

My guess is that Siri makes using web services much easier for normal people, and improved usability leads to increased usage. That's a great thing, not inefficiency.

Keep in mind that it's far more efficient for a city to provide a universal service paid for by taxes than to waste a fortune building access controls and billing systems in order to keep people out until they pay. For example, look at telephony - the accounting and billing systems that control, track, and charge for the phone calls costs far, far more than the actual cost of providing the phone calls. Is it really that important to triple the cost of phone calls just to make sure that nobody gets free phone calls?

Historically, privatized services provide lower quality service at higher cost than the same services run by public utilities. This has happened thousands of times, all over the planet, with the same effect. The only good argument for privatizing public utilities is profit to a small number of people doing the deal, generated by extracting the money from the public. Not a good argument, IMO.

That's exactly what many cities have done. That is, rather then staffing up the municipal IT staff to run a small ISP, some cities contract with an ISP to provide the service to the city. It's more efficient because the ISP has one, big customer to manage instead of billing thousands of individuals, so much lower administrative overhead. So the people "win" because they get internet access provided as a service paid for by their taxes, at much lower cost than if they were individually billed.