This was our personal device, and we have better things to do with our time...

Lots of schools did get iPad ones when they came out, I imagine Apple made them "good deals" on new mini replacements. After our 2nd mini bit the dust, an Apple rep comped us a new one - as if we had paid the AppleCare, though we hadn't.

Agreed, but if I wanted to play like that, I'd buy Kindle Fires for 1/3 the price and jailbreak them...

Good for you. Our iPad one was used by our elementary school children. Updates to the OS and apps made things as simple as "Brain Pop" stop functioning.

You can blame the app authors for abandoning iPad one support - they were out there supporting it in 2010 and 2011 - but, without Apple driving the "ecosystem" ever forward, the app authors could have left their apps as they were, functioning wonderfully, until about 2013. After that, virtually everything we used crawled to a useless halt - including Safari.

So, if you use your iPad one for something that wasn't impacted, great for you. Ours ended up as a black mirror.

The updates it did receive were enough to make the iPad one virtually useless.

The problem with the iPad ecosystem is that the apps (that we cared about) are "cloud connected" so you have to upgrade them to the latest versions to continue to access the cloud content. The content hasn't changed, but the "upgraded" OS required to run the "updated" apps (which, themselves often do little more than deliver a video from a website), bogged the iPad One down to unusability.

To clarify, this is the original iPad released in 2010, the nice big heavy one with the screen that never cracked, the built-in 3G radio that worked great for non-video content, the long life battery, and the bulletproof back case.

We got a mini when they came out, and it lasted pretty well, but was not as durable as the iPad one, not by a longshot. Then, when the first mini died, we replaced it with another mini and that one self-destructed within less than a year - same kids using it, more gentle with it than they ever were with the iPad one, but the new minis are made like tissue paper in comparison to the original iPad.

What they really need to be taken to court over is what they did to the iPad one - obsoleting it within just a couple of years, long before the hardware was "worn out" or even outdated. The OS "upgrades" and mandatory update of all the apps turned the iPad one into a virtual paperweight. A $700 paperweight, less than 3 years after purchase.

That's some sad truth about Android... maybe it will mature into something as developer friendly as Linux someday, but for now I'd say it's a bigger PITA to develop for than Linux was even 20 years ago.

I suppose I should check out WSL - but the last time I delved into the world of VMs, et. al. I came out screaming and went back to trusty GRUB dual boot.

It cuts both ways, but I think if you analyze modern society, you'll find women taking more childbirth and care oriented leave - on average.

I'm less concerned with what's "underneath" a computer desktop and more concerned with how it looks and performs "on the glass."

I'm feeling a "polishing a turd" analogy coming on, something about rub too hard on the old desktop apps and they'll get messy - especially the integrated ones where changes will smear around on everything. Gnome 3 has been baking in the sun for 6 years now, KDE 4 for 9 years, they are what they are... which is pretty damn good for the most part, but they both have tremendous room for improvement, and aren't keeping up with the shiny new hardware as well as Windows (because Redmond has conned the shiny new hardware vendors into writing drivers for them...)

I would tend to agree, but then "geek" with the 4 digit user ID above seems to be claiming, with a straight face, "SUPERIOR" as an objective measure.

I thought: "works on my new laptop as-default-installed" was an objective measure, one that Unity was winning a couple of years ago. Not that I'm lamenting Unity's departure, but to give credit where due, the Unity group were the first to make 4K screens work well, so at the time when they had it nailed and everybody else was fumbling around with configuration customizations that didn't really solve even half the problems (I'm looking at you KDE, but GNOME was there too), I'd say Unity was objectively superior.

Today? Who knows, I've got a 15.10 install that works pretty well and haven't had time to play around with it much. I hear bad things about 16.04 - whatever - I'll deal with those warts when I have to, maybe they'll be improved by then.

Phablets, mini notebooks - there are converged devices, just not many users for these devices.

My Nexus 5x has higher screen resolution than the "desktop" monitor I'm typing this on, and can interface to bluetooth keyboard and mouse, if I cared to.

I do wish that Jolla would have gotten some traction with their Linux based tablet/phones...

The GNOMEs moaned the loudest when Unity was forced upon the world.

The whiny wheel often does get its way.

Adjectives like "SUPERIOR" in the title and "wonderful" in the description tell you a lot about the author's objectivity.

I'm no Unity fan, but it did handle 4K screens well at a time when nothing else would. I do wish KDE would get its 5 together (maybe it has, I honestly haven't cared enough to check in over a year). The worst thing about GNOME is reading how AWESOME it is, and then having to use its outdated, fragmented, counterintuitive crap because it got default-installed on you. Anybody who thinks that the "resource hog" arguments of >10 years ago have any relevance to today's desktop machines (RPi excepted) kindly see yourself out.

I'll be dual-desktop installing all the apps I can't stand the GNOME variants of, and that's O.K. - what I lament is that nobody is taking the time to polish a distro where everything KDE and GNOME "just works" as installed from apt-get.

Did the analysis take into account time off for childbirth and care?

If they say they did, did they do it correctly?