While increasing costs are sneakily driven by providers, the biggest cost saver of the cloud is simply having competent people handling your infrastructure. Most self-hosted/in-house infrastructure teams are run by amateurs or understaffed people led by people who have no clue about the back-end. Removing people not qualified for this type of service/decision-making definitely prevents problems such as obsolescence and many security issues.

An interesting thing that could emerge from this is that lost media (shows and movies which did not make it to DVD) might be found and digitised for long term preservation. Hopefully it's more than just consumption going on with these sets.

As has already been pointed out, as long as interpreted language with huge overheads such as Javascript, Java, .NET, Python and the like are still the norm with no acceptable native replacements (C++ does not offer the flexibility that attracts programmers to those languages), the pollution caused by dynamically recompiling code to run even the simplest of programs won't reduce. Another aspect that needs to be addressed is programmers living in fantasy worlds where optimisation is the compiler's job and running things on the cloud makes inefficiency magically disappear. Train programmers with an understanding of the hardware and optimisation and your reduce energy consumption while making better programmers overall.

Several prominent YouTubers mentioned iMessage as one of their key reasons to stick to iPhones here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Where are the comparisons with actual high performance Intel computers in PCs? Macs have been using outdated Intel technology for years, this performance boost is only relevant to the Mac crowd who is unaware of greener pastures elsewhere (at least when it comes to overall system performance).

False, meat production is responsible for around 30% of all greenhouse gas emissions. Stop mixing up your feelings on your personal food choices with what is required of our species to actually survive the coming centuries.

Well said, bravo! Bravo!

The Picasa Desktop Picture Viewer is excellent, starts up extremely fast and is visually pleasing while supporting a whole host of formats. If they're dropping it from their products list at least open source this component.

There's nothing strange about the lack of updates, anyone having read the Winamp forums (alive through all this) knows that they had to remove large parts of the AOL code and had already announced a very tentative 2015 re-release date. They've started alpha builds recently, so everything is proceeding smoothly.

There's a reason you're an anonymous coward, whining like that could probably be heard from the moon.

Ever heard of different needs of different people? When you temporarily need a tab for later you keep it open that is why tabs exist, having multiple web pages organised and instantly available instead of hidden behind layers of clicks. If you've ever done extensive online research on a subject out of personal curiosity tab multiplication is a normal process and tab groups are a great way of going about it. Mozilla barely advertised the feature and hid it in a corner of the customisation UI with no way for the casual user to discover it, of course it did not gain traction. I use it regularly and am frankly sad to see it go as it was just a case of badly advertised features.

There's an ongoing trend with technologies that are somewhat similar to sci-fi tropes but do not do what those devices do that is worrying these days, recent examples: 1. Hoverboards that require metal surfaces instead of floating over anything (you know, hover?) 2. Tractor beams that are actually high intensity wave generators, need a medium to travel through and do not have anywhere near the level of power and flexibility an actual tractor beam has (it's not even a beam!) This is not to diminish the achievement of the existing technologies but please stop calling them by the wrong names.

Thanks, does this refer to some older form of RAM too?

I found information on PC100 but what's korr?

Google should really start providing a search context or search persona system that allows you as the user to explicitly specify what sort of results you're looking for (e.g. programmer, chemistry student, hipster trash) as well as a plain no filter bubble option. I'm also encountering issues such as those pointed out by OP.