Um... You can get both a 13" and 15" Mac laptop with integrated graphics. The addition of integrated graphics in the 15" form factor was one of the things I liked about the last refresh. Even if you get a higher end 15" model or the 17" model you still get integrated graphics in addition to the discrete graphics so while you can't avoid the cost of the discrete graphics on these higher end systems you don't need to suffer the battery penalty discrete graphics brings. The discrete graphics adds maybe $100 to the cost of the machines it's on and at $3200 AUD for the cheapest Mac laptop with discrete graphics it's hardly an unbearable cost if you decide you don't need it.

Compared to the PC world, Apple certainly does have an anaemic product line but you can't force them to make a computer just for you. Apple makes premium machines so they're always going to cost more than merely average machines. If you don't demand a premium product, look elsewhere. Personally, I find the PC world to be a sea of bad to mediocre products. Sure they're cheap but I don't want a fat machine, or a machine that flexes when I pick it up, or something that's unreasonably heavy. Perhaps there are premium PCs out there but I haven't seen them for sale around here.

I like the third person camera whenever I need to _see_ anything (eg. while moving about above ground or engaged in a sword fight). But I'm playing an archer now so I need the first person camera whenever there's enemies nearby.

I could handle having only a third person camera if the game handled archery a little less precisely but a first person only camera would be annoying unless the game came with ultra-widescreen wrap-around 3D glasses. There's a reason why FPSes tend to feature underground levels so heavily. It's hard to see the world when you're looking through a 90 degree lens.

Here's how you avoid losing history. I know... you said "the default should be" but it is at least possible. I'm sure most people don't actually use multiple shells at the same time anyway ;)

# Don't clobber .bash_history
shopt -s histappend
HISTFILE=$HOME/.bash_history
# This should be enough to last for years
HISTFILESIZE=1000000000
HISTSIZE=1000000
#HISTCONTROL=ignorespace # start a command with a space and it doesn't go into t
HISTCONTROL=ignoredups # ignore duplicates
#HISTCONTROL=ignoreboth # both of the above
precmd()
{
        history -a # export history
}
PROMPT_COMMAND=precmd

I have precmd as a function because my precmd actually does more than just exporting history.

What this does is to append every command you run in every shell to ~/.bash_history. If you run history -n you import watever is not in your current shell's history from .bash_history. You can even put history -n in your precmd but that can give somewhat unexpected results when you are using multiple shells at once.