Your last paragraph is preeminently simple. Why DO people pay THREE times more for every freaking Apple product and get so little increment in functionality and even a DECREMENT in terms of hooking up 3rd party stuff (try hooking up an old Samsung printer to a new IMac ... slap-upside-the-head simple with Win 7)? I'm actually a Unix afficionado and have written lots of deep C on Linux and IRIX with IPC, Sockets, ... you name it ... but I find Apple's price points OFFENSIVE. Hence, I'd rather buy a Win box and just put UWin on it ... for dirt cheap. Apple is now a tech company for hipsters who want to belong to the CULT. Take that to the "genius bar".

Haven't ANY of you taught a single course and noticed that nobody has a readily available fund of knowledge so they can answer questions without doing ten lookups?? My view is that people are getting dumber and one preeminent quality of that dumbness is a low knowledge base. So what're we gonna do ... have "conversations" between know-nothings that take an hour for a five minute conversation because everybody's busy looking up stuff on their Iphones because they know no history, music, science, literature, economics, or world affairs?? I think the study in question merely points out prosaically what almost every teacher knows.