Probably for the same reason Nintendo is selling Smash Bros. 4 for Wii U and Smash Bros. 4 for Nintendo 3DS as separate SKUs: so that you'll buy both.

Even if you own the kernel, the device manufacturer owns the design of the module that monitors the boot process. In the x86 world I think they call this a TPM.

Prior to Jelly Bean 2 (Android 4.2), Android didn't really have multiuser capabilities. How many Android devices in the field are running Jelly Bean 2? Many are still shipping with Gingerbread (2.3). And as I understand it, phones still don't ship with multiuser; only 7" and bigger tablets do. You have to root to get multiuser on a phone.

Would you use a desk big enough to hold only one sheet of paper? Alt-tabbing between your textbook and where you are writing your solutions to the exercises can get tiring.

Any desktop Chrome browser is running what is essentially the user space of the Chrome OS, just with a different kernel.

21 inches for one application? Google has strongly resisted any attempt to add tiled or overlapping window management policy to stock Android. This means applications have to be coded to each hardware manufacturer's proprietary window management API. I can dig up Google employees' explanation of this "all maximized all the time" policy and why Cornerstone isn't in CyanogenMod if you want.

A star that became brighter because it exploded? Might as well call it the Pinto. Oh wait, Ford took that one.

There are also fans of console-exclusive franchises (e.g. anything whose characters appear in Smash Bros. series except Sonic), fans of genres that rarely get ported to PC (e.g. fighting games, platformers, and certain JRPGs), and people who prefer one-button convenience in their gaming. These people may do their gaming on a console and everything else on OS X or GNU/Linux.

And the Internet has since come full friggin' circle, with dedicated mobile applications to access particular services.

Sony uses permissively licensed free software, such as *BSD operating systems. The X-series MPEG-4 video encoders (Xvid, x264, and x265), on the other hand, are copylefted. Console makers in general ban copylefted software on their platforms because allowing game publishers to distribute "Installation Information" (GPLv3) or "scripts to control [...] installation" (GPLv2) would allow other publishers to circumvent licensing.

The same was true of MPEG-2 hardware (DVD players) and MPEG-4 ASP hardware (DVD players with DivX). It took Blu-ray and smartphones to get AVC hardware into users' hands. People replace smartphones regularly. And just as Blu-ray Disc with AVC replaced DVD-Video with MPEG-2, whatever optical disc format replaces Blu-ray Disc is likely to include HEVC as an option for 4K video.

Does "hardware support for H.264" refer to dedicated silicon that does nothing but AVC decoding, or does it refer to implementing AVC's inner loops in a programmable digital signal processor such as a GPU? If the latter, it may be reprogrammable for HEVC. In fact, with HEVC increasing opportunities for parallelism, it might be easier to bring the GPU in.

Ideally, you added multi-format support to your HTML5 applets when VP8 came out, and plugging in support for VP9 and H.265 won't be too hard.

Just a guess, but the "x" in x264 comes from it being the H.264 counterpart to Xvid, which is DivX spelled backward, and DivX is named after an experimental time-limited counterpart to DVD-Video that Circuit City was pushing.

Dual licensing permits the x264 maintainer to dual license the x264 code to clients unwilling to accept the GPL. The agreement permits the x265 maintainer to do the same with pieces of x265 that were borrowed from x264.