"Learn your geeky history. Apple didn't but Steve Jobs did build all Next manufacturing to high tech facilities in the US."

You learn YOUR geeky history. Apple initially had all their manufacturing done in the US, and kept at least some manufacturing there, up until the early to mid 90s. They had factories in Fremont and Sacramento, CA, and another in Fountain, CO, to name three. You can easily tell the factory that built a given Mac from letters at the beginning of the serial number-- the only two that I still remember are "FC" for the Fremont factory, and "CK" for one they had in Cork, Ireland.

I actually just read the Jobs biography, and he apparently had a meeting with Obama during which Jobs took him to task over how difficult and expensive it is to open a new factory in the US, compared to nearly anywhere else in the world. I got the sense that Jobs would have happily done some production in the US again if it made business sense to do so.

~Philly

...and if you disagree with me, you can bite my shiny metal ass!

~Philly

Yup. Plenty of historical accounts have said this. IBM saw Apple's success and wanted a piece of the personal computer market, and quickly. They formed a team to do an end-run around their own bureaucracy and slap something together with off the shelf components in a year. They thought the copyrighted BIOS would be their protection from cloners, but Compaq footed the bill for the first legal reverse engineering of it. Once it was proven doable, another company did it (I think it was Phoenix Technologies) and sold their BIOS to anyone who wanted it. Then the PC clone floodgates opened.

IBM later tried to stuff the commoditization genie back in the bottle with the MicroChannel architecture that shipped in their Personal System/2 machines, but the licensing for it was so onerous the major cloners ignored it, banded together and standardized on (I believe) ISA.

Hackintosh fileserver
Beige PPC Mac home automation server
Mac mini development server
Web Power Switch
Hackintosh desktop
2 MacBooks
Laser printer
iPhone
TiVo Series 1 with added NIC
2 Rokus
2 IP security cameras

The hell it doesn't. I have practically outsourced my short-term memory to the Reminders app in the last week. Anytime I need to remember something-- particularly when I'm in the car-- it's incredibly easy to hold down a button for 2 seconds and tell my phone "Remind me to [activity] at [time] and/or when I [leave/arrive] [location]". I would never use it that much if I had to set those up manually.

Voice Control in the iPhone 3GS was a gimmick. Siri added utility to my iPhone from day one, and it's only going to get better with time.

It's also only a matter of time before Siri moves into Mac OS X. Mark my words, in the near future one of the F keys on Apple keyboards will be a Siri button (though you'll also have the option for always-on listening and have to address the computer by name to indicate a command).

~Philly

Exactly. Too bad nobody at Microsoft understands that. I mean, if anyone there did, they surely wouldn't have kept trying to cram desktop Windows into phones and tablets for the last decade. They have such a hard on for leveraging existing Windows applications that they are willfully blind to the notion that you need an OS and apps that are purpose-built for the form factor they're going to inhabit. Even after iPhone and iPad came around and proved it by their overwhelming success, Microsoft is still stubbornly doing the same shit.

~Philly

You are so full of shit your eyes are brown. Every version of OS X I have used has felt perceptibly faster than its predecessor on the same hardware, and I'm not the only one who feels that way. Hell, the upgrade from Leopard to Snow Leopard was specifically about trimming the fat from the OS.

If you want to talk about bloated OSes that force hardware upgrades, you'd better talk Microsoft.

Uh huh. I've been doing computer support for Windows users for twenty years. If I had a buck for every time I've had an interaction like this with a client, I could retire:

Me: Okay, now I need you to right-click on [whatever] and choose [whatever] from the menu that pops up.
Them: Ok, I clicked on it, but there's no menu, the icon just got dark.
Me: It sounds like you just clicked on it, I need you to right-click on it.
Them: Right-click?
Me: (hiding exasperation that it's the 21st century and I'm STILL having to explain this to people) Click on the button on the right side of the mouse.
Them: (astonished) You mean it does something else????

OS X Server would have done better if Apple loosened up the license terms and let it run on non-Apple hardware. I can see why they wouldn't do that while selling the xServe, but once they no longer had a dog in the fight they should have relented. VMware VSphere 5 supports Lion Server, but from what I've read, only when VSphere is running on Apple hardware. If Apple allowed OS X Server to run virtualized on any hardware it would have seen an immediate sales spike (Well, discounting the fact that Lion Server has been widely reviled as a piece of crap compared to Snow Leopard Server.) There are plenty of large Windows-based companies that have Macs, and the ability to better manage them via throwing an instance of OS X Server on their existing VM infrastructure would have been music to their ears.

I've got a hackintosh in the next room that has run Leopard Server and now Snow Leopard Server like a champ for years-- but that's just for my personal needs. I have to figure out problems on my own (there aren't many, and most are related to the fact I'm not running on Apple hardware), and if it goes down for a couple days it's not a huge deal. I could never plunk one in a production environment for a client, where they would expect to be able to call Apple for support and multi-day downtime could hurt their business.

~Philly

Amazon.Com does NOT have a sales tax advantage in the eyes of the law. Yes they do not collect them, but individuals are still required by law to pay use tax on them unless the item is tax-free per state guidelines. So if the state is losing money, it is because Amazon's customers are committing tax fraud.

Wrong. They sell a server configuration of the Mac Pro, as well. They've sold a server configuration of their high-end tower since the waning days of the beige G3 machines back in 1998; the mini server is a relatively new phenomenon. Anyway, the "Server" configuration is just a matter of prepackaged and preinstalled convenience-- any Mac could be a server, it just needs OS X Server installed on it. They could offer laptops with a "server" configuration if they wanted to.

Granted, in most cases I'd rather have something rackmountable with LOM and redundant PSUs, but for the SMB market most likely to use a Mac as a server, a mini is perfect-- it's tiny, it's quiet, it sips power, and it doesn't need much in the way of care and feeding. Throw a low-end UPS on it, mirror its internal drives, hook up an external USB drive for Time Machine backups, and you've got yourself a pretty capable little box. Especially when the alternative would be some Dell or HP monstrosity running Windows SBS-- if SBS gets any more bloated and ungainly, the boot time will need to be measured with a calendar.

~Philly

I haven't had a chance to sit down and play with Lion Server yet, but the reviews I've read so far (including this one) do not impress me. Hopefully some features will get added back due to customer complaints. If the bit where you need two different admin apps to configure all the services is true, that's completely asinine. They had it right in Snow Leopard Server, where the Server Preferences app was aimed at non-geeks, but if you knew what you were doing you could do what you needed to from within Server Admin.

~Philly

It is because they screwed up almost 6 years ago with the NGE patch which turned the game into a total rip-off of World of Warcraft. After a bunch of people on my SWG server jumped ship for World of Warcraft, I downloaded the demo and as I went through it and you could see where SOE copied the feature exactly. Even worse than that, they released the "new game enhancements" with the "legacy quest" that got you to level 40-something leaving you to essentially grind out the remaining 40-some levels to hit 90 (which was the cap when I quit). The worst part is after losing a massive chunk of their playerbase in the space of a month and forced to give refunds for the Trials of Obi-Wan expansion pack, they still refused to admit the NGE was a mistake. They did not test anything properly it seemed (anyone remember the Publish 27 Commando PvP of pointing the heavy weapon down, holding down the fire button, and then running at the person you wanted to kill?) and the game would change more radically than WoW ever has.

The irony is Blizzard's VP was quoted as saying they were actually afraid of Star Wars Galaxies because of the strong Star Wars intellectual property. However SOE, with LucasArts' assistance, managed to screw it up to the point not even the fanboys could save it

Probably because it is an attempt by a politician's followers to, in effect, rewrite history to suit the views of that politician.