Yeah, and after Ballmer fully gained control, Microsoft released Vista. XP doesn't count because it's Windows 2000 with Fischer-Price icons and some end-user stuff ported from Windows ME.

I bought myself a $4 DVIHDMI cable on Ebay (to connect an external monitor to my laptop with a digital interface - since the colors are worse on VGA).
No audio, no encryption, so no possibility to screw up (compared to HDMIHDMI conections), right? The cable worked OK for two weeks, then stopped working as if it was unplugged. To get it working I had to disconnect it from the monitor (the DVI end) and reconnect it a couple of times until the laptop detected the exernal monitor.
Bought a regular HDMIHDMI cable with a DVIHDMI adaptor for a total of $15 in a local computer styore, works OK. The only issue is that the monitor displays a "check cable" message when the laptop is powered off instead of entering sleep mode.

By the way, regular polyethilene insulation with a metal connector is better than the cool-looking kevlar (?) shield with gold connectors. Gold usually turns out to be paint and comes off after a few reconnections and the "kevlar" shield peels off.

Who needs a multi-megabyte runtime when "hello world" can be run on a multi-gigabyte dedicated virtual machine!

You may hate cloud computing but people who can't install and configure their own software often prefer to pay a mothly fee for a cloud office suite instead of paying an IT guy to clean their Windows registry.

Because Apple can earn a couple hundered bucks. And also charge more for the Apple-certified HDD.

There is one, it's called Mac Mini.

If you want a tower, get a Mac Pro.

You're speaking as if iPad 2 isn't already slow, restricted and clunky.

iPad has the apple connector, you can use it for some tasks (via proprietary adapters). And Wifi/bluetooth are the modern versions of RS232. Oh, and ipad has analog audio output at no extra charge!

Netbooks are cheap laptops with a small form factor. Expensive small notebooks existed for years - for example Sony Vaio or Toshiba Libretto.
Overall, netbooks also are a combination of factors: battery life, price and portability.
Carrying a $199 netbook which can run at least 5 hours from one charge means a lot - it can be carried everywhere and if it breaks, this is not as bad as breaking a $3000 notebook. Having your projects with you (and without carrying a heavy briefcase or worrying of losing an expensive gadget) can sometimes be a big deal.

Underwater eathquakes cause tsunamis.

Apple has been insisting for years that OSX has zero viruses. Users start to think they're invincible and run any downloaded binaries without a second thought.
Apple is also releasing security updates (but less frequently than Microsoft). In addition, since Apple products "just work", sometimes they have to reduce security in order to make the product easier to use.

How are you going to determine that the website is youbank.com/creditcards and not yourbank.com.cr/editcards? For some cases the usual SSL padlock icon is not enough - some websites (e.g. Twitter) have no encryption and some sites have self-signed certificates.

HTC did a lot of customizations to Windows Mobile to make it a usable OS, especially after iPhone was released. Before that HTC was one of generic OEM Windows Mobile manufacturers. Since Microsoft decided to prevent manufacturers from customizing the software in WP7 (most likely to prevent fragmentation like Android), Nokia can only differentiate themselves by producing interesting hardware.
Remember that Palm, while producing great hardware, couldn't win the market with a series of Windows phones.

Why the hell does Apple need Java? I the past 4 years they're been developing a closed platform that's does a limited set of tasks extremely well. Apple's business model is based on reducing hardware/software to a limited number of configurations. Knowing in advance where the software will run allows them to create a great user experience (or throw away the features if they don't work well, like video recording on pre-3GS phones).

Java, on the other hand, makes you write software for a completely unknown platform, with any OS, screen size and CPU. Now why would Apple want that? Their greatest strength is optimizing their software for a specific hardware/OS combination. Look at Microsoft, they wanted Windows everywhere and ended up with Windows Mobile and the touchscreen-enabled Windows 7, both of which are selling poorly.

Yeah, and that's the reason why manufacturers stop updating firmware less than a year after a phone is announced.
Yes, you can install custom firmware like Cyanogen, but the process is complex and the custom firmware often contains nasty bugs (e.g. a buggy battery monitor draining the battery in older Cyanogen versions)

Since a large portion of Google's income is generated by ads, Bing showing Google results is identical to people who record TV shows, remove ads and put the show on The Pirate Bay.
I'm pretty sure you aren't allowed to generate requests to Google search through the same interface as web browsers. In fact you'll get a captcha if you post too much requests from the same IP. You are supposed to use the APIs, which require registrations and possibly pay some fee. So this is probably not a surprise to Google.