Sure you can do them on a phone, but they work much better on a tablet.

There's nothing you can accomplish on a 24" screen in Photoshop that you couldn't also accomplish on a 12" screen, but go ahead and try and switch out the monitor on the desk of your nearest graphic designer, and see how they react.

Add in the fact that with these devices you actually interact by touching the screen, and that increased size is even more useful.

Even if your argument is as basic as "Tablets are just a big phone", then I still don't see how that's a particularly damaging complaint. The biggest problem that I have with my phone is that the screen is too small. A tablet goes a long way to solve that.

They can't replace everything seriously, but they can replace many things seriously.

Web browsing on a tablet is good enough for 90% of the people out there.

Email on a tablet is good enough for 90% of the people out there.

Gaming on a tablet is good enough for 90% of the people out there.

Word processing on a tablet is good enough for maybe 50% of the people out there.

Programming on a tablet is good enough for maybe 1% of the people out there.

So they're not good at everything, but they're very decent at a lot of stuff. They are a credible replacement for desktop/laptop computers for a lot of people.

Expecting that you can use your property in any manner you choose is fine. Expecting a manufacturer to make significant design decisions based on your atypical anticipated usage is entitlement.

and extra skinny fingers.

Look, I know it's fashionable to act like everyone not on /. is a mindless zombie completely unable to think about anything at all, but if it was that easy to get millions of people to drop $500+ in the middle of a huge recession, then more companies besides Apple would be doing it.

This whole "hype" excuse has been used to dismiss Apple's success since back during the early iPod days, which was almost a decade ago. If there was nothing behind it except hype, it would not be continuing just as strong (much less growing) 10 years later. Fads don't last that long.

Have you tried taking the computer/battery into an Apple Store and asking them about it. That sounds like unusually bad performance for a battery, and even though you're outside of the warranty, they're often pretty generous about fixing stuff.

Meh, when someone basis their argument on things that aren't true, you might as well say something to them about it. Especially when you're sitting at home waiting for the plumber who said he'd be there to fix your water heater two hours ago.

They should've released the original iPad with a processor stolen from 15 years in the future, and just massively underclocked it. Then each software upgrade could underclock it a little bit less, and that way it could always match the speed of the current devices.

I guess you haven't been paying much attention to the past couple of decades.

A year is a significant chunk of time in the technology world. 15 months as "state of the art" is more than you should expect.

An hour or two? Why stop there? If you're going to all this trouble to complete exaggerate the rate at which the batteries age, why stop at a couple hours? Why not go with 15 minutes? 10 minutes? How about when you plug it into the wall, it'll cut off power to the rest of your house?

Now that sounds terrible.

Thanks for the free therapy session. I feel like we've made a breakthrough here.

Waaahwaaah. I'm not going to argue that corporations are some sort of gracious fountain of good, but to argue that they're automatically destroying the entire world just because they're trying to make money is not a very good argument. The past few hundred years have seen insane advances in technology, serious improvements in quality of life for most of the world, and some truly amazing things being created and done by mankind, and the vast majority of it was driven in large part by good ol'fashioned capitalism.

Now we certainly don't live in a utopia, and completely unrestricted capitalism obviously presents all sorts of problems. The environment has suffered, not everyone has had their lot improved, and sometimes we seem to take steps back just as often as we take steps forward. But enabling people to make money by creating stuff and selling it to other people has driven progress more than anything else.

I feel that my smartphone makes a measurable improvement on my quality of life. I can afford to buy one. I look at the options and choose the one that appeals to me the most and hand over my money. I don't really care whether or not my quality of life was a consideration of the phone's designers or if their goal is just to make money, all I care about is the end result is that I can get a phone that I like. The emotions or ethics or whatever behind it are irrelevant to me.

Yeah, it's interesting how every story about a new technology ends up full of comments about how it's not a big deal, how it only works in a lab, how any real applications are decades away, etc... yet there's new faster, better, cooler, more efficient, etc... products coming out all the time.

That's not to say that if someone starts crowing about their exciting new discovery that you should automatically rush in and invest all your money in it, but technology does actually move forward, and not everything is complete BS. And when you're talking about a company like IBM, who have a respectable history of research and invention, I'm generally inclined to believe that they're at least on the trail of something interesting, and not just throwing big words out to try and impress people.

Many servers do have a general etiquette, but griefing is certainly common. There are mods out there that provide ways to protect areas/structures/chests and even to disallow access to sections of the world. It's currently still very limited though, it's basically a command line interface to set it all up, and there aren't any visual effects that let you know an area is protected. You just all of a sudden hit an invisible wall, or a block that you destroyed regenerates and gives you a protected message, etc.

Hopefully stuff like this will either be incorporated directly into the game in better ways, or the promised modding support will allow the mod makers to improve their work.

Lately I've been primarily playing on multiplayer servers, which up until yesterday had a bug where if you dropped your tools it would reset their damage to zero. I imagine that a mod that makes tools last forever will become available pretty soon and become rather popular.