So they need to spend more time convincing vendors who have already announced products, like Lacie who you can pre-order a Thunderbolt Little Big Disk from? What more, exactly, do you want Apple to do? As for Western Digital and Seagate, do they even make drive enclosures?

So instead of reading the fucking article you thought you'd post about it? Brilliant!

Nope, I plug my monitor power cord directly into the UPS, not into my computer.

Again, nope. Firewire over Thunderbolt can negotiate transfers between the devices directly with no intermediate computer, just as Firewire itself can now.

Because a portable drive is the easiest way to transfer large volumes of date, of course. Also for security reasons sometimes you have to take data with you physically, when you leave and put it in a safe.

I might also mention this is finally a published industry standard not tied to any one vendor that can work as a docking port for laptops, basically making traditional docking stations no longer needed.

Which is why for several years there all USB devices shipped only in bondi blue to match the look of the iMac? Sorry, but Apple basically created the mainstream USB peripheral market before the PC market caught up and started using them as well.

I'm glad to see Apple rolling out Thunderbolt to their whole lineup and not restricting it to the high end. Anything they can do to promote this and get it mainstream for all computers will be a benefit to the industry and end users. Tangles of cords, switching cords, and unchainable unintelligent standards have been hampering us for too long. No, I don't want to have to have a computer in between my video camera and my high capacity storage drive. No, I don't want to have more than one cable between my monitor and computer and yes I want to plug USB devices, microphones, hard drives, etc. to the device on top of my desk instead of climbing under it. The throughput and flexibility here has been needed for a long time. Come on industry, full speed ahead with this one!

Apple has long had a policy of maintaining versions of their OS's on other platforms in order to insure code portability and good architecture, even when they have no intention of ever releasing on that platform.

Apple has wisely kept the developer tools used on iOS under their control. As such "porting your apps to x86" would likely mean recompile and run through debugging on another device before it is added to the store as an option for those users. Apple is very well positioned to make an architecture transition without losing he advantage of which you speak. Note that I'm not arguing that is their intention, just that your reasoning is flawed in this regard.

I would elaborate on this point a bit. They will have a valid credit card to charge the membership. If this is a stolen card, when the owner notices the theft and/or incorrect charges, Apple can pull the offending apps from the store and revoke their encryption keys as well as begin an investigation into the risk posed to users who had the app. If the app is one that is paid for or makes money from ads, Apple has the actual account info and identifying the criminal is easy for police. Both cases provide real benefit to end users being targeted, although there is more that can be done yet.

[Citation needed.]

Noting that as of a few years ago, research showed the opposite of your claim.

Apple has already started sandboxing binaries they ship with OS X, for example the zeroconf service which is one of the few exposed default services running on OS X. At least some people at Apple seem to "get it" that just because it ships with the OS doesn't mean it should have more access or more trust than it needs. I can't imagine Apple is going to reverse their security trend and start sandboxing fewer binaries going forward.

Clearly it was time to update my Chrome install. It had fallen a bit behind since my last round of performance/compliance tests.

Seem? Seeming is rather relative I suppose. Anandtech's tests on real world laptop battery resulting the following quotes:

Arsechnica, on the other hand concluded from their real world use tests that Macbooks are just, "better than average". So I guess I'd have to ask you how you formed your perception that regular laptops have better battery performance in real world use.

Everyone copies from everyone. Tabs were in Omniweb (albeit with a slightly different implementation) in 1999. Spell checking should be implemented at the OS level and rolled out as a service to apps (as OS X does). Re-implementing it for every app is idiotic architectural design. Numerous browsers on OS X had spellchecking before Opera (since 2000) and they have grammar checking as well. Admittedly, Opera can't do a lot about the fact that OS's have failed to step up and implement spellchecking as a service, but they could at least plug into the native functionality when it is offered. There was Firefox plug-in to synch bookmarks in 2005. That's not to say Opera isn't a fine browser and even the first to bring some features into popularity, but don't go getting blinded by your like of one product. It's too easy to not look hard at the history an just buy into what you want to be true.

Funny. My plug-in became incompatible when I upgraded to 4, but 4 added the feature anyway, so I never noticed. I'm glad they finally got around to rolling it into the core application. It is certainly one of those things that benefits all users and should be a default feature.

This is interesting in an article about unique browser features. Maybe a better article would go through features rarely known about. Like in Safari you can click the "reader" button in the URL bar and it consolidates multi-page articles in to a single page including the images. There is a Firefox extension called "repagination" to do the same thing. Given how much I see people complaining about multi-page articles, it would have been nice for this article to have covered this.

Similarly, Safari and some Firefox plug-ins allow the user to grab the corner of text input boxes and resize them, which is an indispensable feature once you've used it, but was also overlooked in this article.

It is also less than useful to assess threats based upon the number of malware titles of different types, rather than the number of infections caused by different types. For example, self propagating worms have fewer unique names than trojans do, but account for a much larger number of infections per name. When last I looked, self propagating worms still accounted for about half of all infections.