When the car industry replaced horses (in the U.S.), that created a wide range of American jobs for a broad range of people with a broad range of skill/education levels. Manufacturing jobs, engineering jobs, repair jobs (your neighbourhood mechanic, anyone?), construction jobs (all the roads needed for cars), etc.

Apple (or most modern technology companies) doesn't. They create engineering jobs (until those get moved to India). They create jobs flipping burgers (the only jobs left for unskilled workers in America) in their cafeteria for the engineers and marketeers. Jobs for FedEx airline pilots who fly planes full of iPads from China. Retail jobs in the Apple stores. But unlike most innovations of an earlier era (cars, airplanes, trains, whatever), iPads (or iPhones or iPods) create next to no blue-collar jobs in the country that invented it. No repair jobs (what repair? send it back to China for refurbishment) and no manufacturing/assembly jobs (all done overseas). And the suppliers' manufacturing jobs (along with many high-skilled engineering jobs, e.g. for the LCD panels) are all overseas too...

I had a BlackBerry a few years ago. It was made in Canada. If RIM can do some of their manufacturing in their home country (I believe they also outsource some production), so could Apple.

They make it sound like they're using fancy servers.

They're not, they're using two proprietary IBM Aptivas, low end machines. (I should know, I have one of them, the same model they used). Firstly, the E56 has a 266 mhz K6, unless IBM lied to me too :) Secondly, 48 megs of RAM seems a bit low for NT. Thirdly, the hard drive systems in there are probably also low quality to say the least.

Couldn't they have borrowed Mindcraft's server or something? At least THEY could tune an NT box :), although not a Linux box... and it was a server. I don't call a home system a server that will be pumping 90 megabits/sec.