I think your 3) is the fundamental reason. If they own the equipment, it becomes very difficult to legally make them open the phones to side loading or tell them how they can make revenue. I keep seeing movements to "regulate" big tech and the App Store is in the regulator's crosshairs due to the Epic lawsuit. 3) is a good mechanism for skirting the issue completely. A more interesting aspect is who owns the data generated on the iPhone. If you have all your photos, movies, and music on iCloud and you can only access them with your iPhone, what happens if you choose to leave Apple? Leasing the iPhone will essentially lock you in with no escape if you value your data. The next few years should be interesting.

Yep... You beat me to it.

I'll let you correct Jack Ridley's wikipedia entry located here... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

The changes to the flight controls which enabled the Bell X-1 to remained controlled through the compressibility of going through Mach 1 were conceived by (then) Capt Jack Ridley, the team's engineer. With all due respect to Chuck Yeager, let's not go with the media's current trend to endow a single person with single handedly having made the project a success. If you've read, Gen Yeager's biography, he goes to great length to credit Capt Ridley with ALL the engineering that made his flight a success. Yeager was just a very skilled pilot who did study the systems and asked pointed questions, but didn't do the engineering. It is sad to have lost him.

This is an existential threat to Facebook and game companies. Their free ride on the internet is almost over. Evidence: 1) Wintel (particularly the intel part) is down and out 2) Nvidia purchasing ARM the number of platforms is shrinking (or in industry terms consolidating) 3) the balkanization of the internet by China, Russia, and potentially Europe 4) the new platform are the Apple/ARM iOS/macOS and Google Android Potentially locked out of China and Europe, where does the likes of Facebook go to grow their business. They need a free ride on Apple and Google in what remains of the North American market.

A few observations: 1) Who cares if they invest in 14 semiconductor plants. There is already a glut of semiconductor plants and an excess of supply. Further, they won't be able to sell into the world market until they come to terms with the vast patent portfolios held by existing semiconductor companies. They may choose to support domestic industries, but that doesn't enable them to dominate the world market. 2) If they are investing in 14 semiconductor plants, Applied Materials must be smiling. 3) Given the problems that Intel is having at 14nm, I don't think those 14 plants will be a threat to state of the art chip making anytime soon. 4) A lot of semiconductors are still made at 180, 90, and 65 nm, particularly analog ICs. 5) A more interesting data point is that US (and world) markets seem to be booming with full employment (in the US anyway) while the semiconductor market is apparently seeing a decline in revenue. Perhaps "high tech" has moved to a different part of the technology spectrum. Someone please explain this conundrum to me. 6) I agree with the observation made by someone here that the next innovation needs to be in software. When computer manufacturers tout "dark mode" as the next gee whiz innovation, you know the "tech" industry is bereft of ideas.

The stupidity of this argument is that Google has won and it has nothing to do with the hardware. It has everything to do with Google Docs. Everything is trackable, how long the kid was logged in, how much time spent on a particular assignment, feedback to parents on why their kid is successful or not, etc. Education institutions are no different than most organizations these days in wanting to track performance of kids and teachers. The school generally couldn't care less what hardware is used, but the tracking capability enabled by Google Docs is now considered the "holy grail" of accountability and explainability.

Figure out how to solve the quantum tunneling gate leakage power problem and you've got a winner. Photolithography has never been identified as a show stopper to continued gate shrinkage. Gate leakage at these dimensions is.

Two observations: 1) The low hanging fruit in physics has been picked. 2) Physics depends upon engineers to develop the technology they used in their experiments. Even Elon Musk, a physicist, has acknowledged that physics often waits for engineering to give them the tools scientists need to test their theories. Case in point, CERN, which depends upon vast computational capabilities to verify their theories that would have been prohibitively expensive even 20 years ago. LIGO required incredibly accurate distance measurements that could not have been built 20 years ago. Most astronomical discoveries these days (and astronomical scale physics experiments) depend upon real-time adaptive optics that could not have been built prior to the mid-1990s.

"Apple stands accused of engaging in a 'multi-year campaign of sloppy, inappropriate and deceitful conduct'." None of which is illegal. This accusation is sloppy, inappropriate, and unless an actual legal violation emerges somewhere, deceitful conduct.

The epitome of a first world problem...

"The other purpose is that many "app" developers are not professional programmers." I think this is the true reason. The next great "app" will come from someone who wouldn't know "big O" notation if they stepped on it. They won't care. They'll only want to create an app that addresses some issue unique to their industry/hobby. All the peripheral marketing hoopla from Apple seems to support this point of view. Once they have their app up (however broken) and are deriving a revenue stream, they can hire software minions for mice nuts to repair the problems.

"During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country’s economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system." Spin this however you want. The quote is real and the sentiment behind "creating" stands for itself.