Well, even Apple can push the arrogance too far. Rumor has it that Steve had Sony as a role-model (talk about reversed roles these days). Regardless, Apple should pay some heed to what happened with Sony. Back in the day, they were regarded as superior and could extract their "Sony tax" with imprudence. After a while, product development centered more around what was good for Sony rather than good for the customer. People still bought Sony products... for a while. Then, it had gone to far and the Sony didn't actually provide premium product anymore. After a while, the buying public actually got wise to that.

These days, Sony has learned the error of its, my Reader now even has an SD card slot in addition to the MemoryStick. This would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.

I see the same happening with Apple. The products look nice in the ads, but when you actually use them, they look like small squids with all the dongles you have to plug into them (yes, I'm looking at you, MacBook DisplayPort dongle, and you "iPad camera connectivity pack"). My Dell may not look so good in the ads, but it looks better in actual use as it has an internal SD card slot, PCMCIA slot and enough USB and display connectors that I don't need to carry a ton of crap to connect it to do something useful.

Why did Apple do this? It's obvious to all except the most fanatic fanboi that it is a question of maximizing Apple's profit, not "improving the user experience". Apple is by no means the only company doing this - Microsoft has taken greed to another level with the Xbox memory accessories, for example.

Time for a really customer-centric company to take over the throne, methinks.

Basically, the basis for thin clients making sense is the supposition that computing power is expensive (just as in the old mainframe days, when the premise was that making lots of terminals and then one big machine made economic sense). Guess what? That doesn't hold true anymore. Computing power is cheap. The "nicities" of good graphics support, decent I/O etc is more expensive than the processor. So why not include some decent processing power in the "thin client". In this case, it is just a regular low-end PC (stationary equivalent of a netbook) running terminal software.

WTF? An inch is fine, but a cm is too short? What kind of argument is that? And what's wrong in saying 30 cm rather than a foot? You are just stating this crap because you've been raised on US Standard, anybody raised on metric will find your "arguments" crazy.

Actually,it is OK to call 10 centimeters a decimeter if your brain hurts by having to count farther than ten.

"Artificial contrived distance" is just crap, an inch is no more "natural" than an inch. And if you try to tell me that Imperial is based on body parts, have you noticed that people's thumbs/feet/whatever have very different sizes? My pinky is around 1 cm across, I'm sure you can find something on your body that matches up.

No doubt that metric is based on arbitrary basic measurements, so is Imperial. The difference is that metric is set up so all the units are connected logically, while Imperial is just a mess. For example: 1 liter=1 dm^3=1 kg

I call bull. The only reason you find fractions convenient, is that you are used to them. In the metric world (that's the rest of the world, man) fractions are not used that much. Who says a 1/12 of something is so damn useful? I would rather have 0.08 of something instead (or 8%).

In the rest of the world, we have our 3mm bolts rather than 1/16th inch or something else ridiculous like that. Metric works just fine for everyday measurements.

The really crazy side of imperial-style measurement is that every country had their (slightly different) measurement system. Imagine the chaos which would have reigned in today's global world if metric hadn't come along...

I would rather say that the only valid argument for using US standard system is that you are used to it. At least metric has two advantages.