But you don't know when phones go out of service. So you can't tell when people are upgrading and when they are holding onto their old phone.

You can't know that from their growth rate. Technically every year it could be the same customers upgrading, so they would have a 100% upgrade rate. There's just no way of knowing that from their sales how many customers are new and how many are upgrading from another iPhone. You have people that buy every new phone, people on a two year upgrade cycle and people on a three year upgrade cycle. There's just to much variance for 'simple math' to get the right answer.

Source?

It is Microsofts fault (or more correctly, was Microsofts fault).You can't blame HP. They tried with the HP Slate, but Microsoft just didn't add decent touch support into the OS soon enough. You can't blame OEMs, once HP got burned no one else wanted to be Microsofts next guinea pig. HP felt so let down by Microsoft that they went and bought Palm. If Microsoft had brought out Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 sooner then we would have several versions of the surface in the market right now.

The media haven't ignored it at all, just recently Mossberg brought Ping up at All Things D

At this point, I don't think the combination of RIM/Nokia/Microsoft would substantially lessen competition in the cell phone industry. No regulator stops an acquisition if one of the companies is going to die without it. It's easy to show that with RIM, a Nokia acquisition would be harder to get past European regulators.

Still, the combined market share of all three for smartphones is ~15%. That isn't the kind of number where regulators step in.With dumb phones, RIM and Microsoft don't really compete for that market, so Nokia's marketshare there wouldn't be a problem. So on a regulator front, they probably would be able to go through with the merger. If Motorola went through, i don't think they are going to stop anyone but Apple from acquiring phone companies.

What are you syncing the contacts to? All of the things you named are for syncing your data between a mac or pc and an ios device.

There is zero reason for wanting to use icloud if you don't own an iOS device or a mac. There are so many other services for windows that do a much better job at a cheaper price. If someone likes apples ecosystem enough to stomach itunes or safari on windows then they already own an iOS device or a mac.

Well your question was, can you access icloud, not setup an account. There's no reason to want an icloud account if you don't have an iOS device or a Mac, which is probably why you can't setup an account online.

Yes you can, just go to icloud.com and log in.

Sun was not happy about it, however their idiotic CEO at the time decided to act like he was fine with it in public. Look at James Goslings comment for a more accurate picture of how Google was screwing Sun.

They've bought both Anobit and P.A. Semi, doesn't that make them a semiconductor company?

Apple already co-invests with building fabrication plants through extremely large pre-purchases, and some analysts think Apple is already directly funding Samsung's A6 fab. You are right about Apple being a product company, they don't want to fund these factories. But they are forced to, because that is the current price of staying ahead of the competition in the phone industry.

These fabs aren't an optional investment, they are the cost of doing business.

I didn't mean it was 'simple' as in anyone could understand it, I meant the actual process for processing the GST is simple. It would take about three or four hours for an Australian tax specialist to give Amazon the appropriate advice. Costs for setting up a GST system is extremely low compared to the kind of revenue Amazon pulls in.

US price= US$2599

Aus price= AUD$3949= US$4134

US/AUS= 2599/4134= 0.62

So not double but still a 60% increase (50% when you take into account GST)

Figuring out whether you are liable for GST takes about 5 minutes. Registering for GST would take a few hours. Nearly every company in Australia registers for GST, so the government made it extremely simple. These things are such a marginal cost that it is ridiculous to use them as a reason for significant price differences.

I personally think it is crippled at the moment (I jailbroke mine and run XBMC on it) but saying it is abandoned just shows your ignorance. Apple just released a new UI and new hardware, as well as building airplay into the next version of Mac OS X.