This is the first indication that the Manchurian Combover administration intends to have successors.

Rust. Because it's relatively new.

Time was, phrases like, "if their entire platform doesn't want to play nice with mainstream standards" were deployed by Microsoft dweebs against UNIX geeks. Did you not notice that iPhone apps are written in Objective C / Cocoa? Swift could just as easily be called, The New Objective C, or Objective C^3, or Objective Cocoa, and none of what you're griping about has changed at all, since the iTunes App Store was first deployed. You don't own a Mac, so you're already not in the iTunes App Store market. Why, again, do you care about this discussion, at all?

Yeah, that definitely shouldn't be overlooked. Apple has a bunch of web-facing apps of their own, implemented in a variety of technologies, including some WebObjects/Java stuff, and some SproutCore/JavaScript stuff. Both of those are essentially clones of portions of (and different generations of) Cocoa (fka NeXTSTEP, which is relevant to recall here, because the WebObjects clone is that old, despite the fact that one of the largest stores on the Internet, iTunes, is built on it).

Here's an interesting political history of WebObjects around the time we last heard from it. As strange as it may seem, there's still an active WebObjects development community despite it being essentially self-supported for nearly a decade, now. Many of the developers in that community were, previously, Objective C developers, and the ones that survived the transition to Java are language agnostics. I suspect they might welcome the opportunity to migrate to a Swift/Cocoa web stack.

It will take some while, but Apple has just made the first step to a "language mindshare" play in the web application space.

"First rule of leadership: everything is your fault." - Hopper, A Bug's Life

How would one implement that while maintaining the ability for a business to decouple purchasing a ticket from the decision of which member of a development team gets to go?

Whoever moderated this "flame bait" needs their ass kicked. That was the funniest thing I've read all week.

Actually, with every announcement you've been demonstrated to be wrong. Mac OS X isn't going anywhere. Apple has quite clearly been working very hard to bring some of the best ideas from iOS to the Mac OS X platform. They also introduced a nascent third platform, iCloud. If there was news of a platform's demise to be read between the lines at the WWDC 2011 keynote yesterday, it's more likely to be the demise of Windows as a consumer OS.

Since Apple currently offers you the choice of a tablet starting at $499 and laptops starting at $1199 (or something like that) and since the choice is already between a tablet iOS device with a subset of functionality, vs. a laptop or iMac with greater "professional" level functionality, then all you've done here is out yourself as a troll, or waste electrons on the internet. Which is it?

Under which section(s) of the Sherman act?

If that scenario pans out (and the recent HP blathering about why they are not interested in Thunderbolt provides some evidence that it might) then you'll see Apple's share of the consumer market growing even faster over the next couple years, when Mac users are loading their iPad with movies to take on the plane in about 90 seconds, and HP users are spending a non trivial part of an hour to do the same.

FireWire was the replacement for SCSI, for connecting fast external drives to a Mac. (Mac computers at one time were all SCSI, internal and external connectors.) There's more about the relationship, at FireWire Wikipedia. My (fuzzy) recollection is that, at one time, one could even get adapter cables to allow FireWire ports on a Mac to connect a SCSI hard drive.

Of course, my next migration will be via Thunderbolt.

FireWire isn't dead, yet. I use it to migrate from one Mac to another about once a year, and to connect hard drives. USB is sorta like gruel. You could eat it. But I've got whole modern cuisines, why would I give that up?

You haven't been paying attention. The "tech geeks" in the families of "non-tech savvy consumers" have been telling them for a few years now, "sell it on eBay and buy a Mac." Thunderbolt will do fine, even if only Mac users get to connect their iPad 3 or iPhone 5 to it and get Thunderbolt 10 Gbps transfer speeds. They won't care what all y'all are doing, and won't be interested in how long it takes you to sync your iPad. "You know how long it takes? Mine is so quick, I never thought about it."