I think that, at least for the average user in their day-to-day tasks, five or six year old computers still perform adequately, and people really have no reason to upgrade. My uncle has an eight year old IBM ThinkPad which he still uses as his primary computer, and it runs Windows XP, Outlook Express and Office 2003 just fine - and that's all he needs. Given, it's more or less approaching the end of its life, the battery doesn't hold a charge and the HDD is as slow as a dog, but having seen his friends' bad experiences with new hardware and the bloated mess that was Vista, he's reluctant to upgrade.

And that bloat I think is causing a lot of this. New hardware isn't much faster than the old if it's dragged down by a bloated OS. And I think it's fair to say that most of these new 'features' aren't really necessary at all, so people don't see a need to upgrade. Why do you think XP still has such a large market share? Because people already have it, it does what they need it to, and there's no real need for them to upgrade.

It's still a monopoly, but I would rather have a monopoly that is accountable to its customers (through elections) as opposed to its shareholders.

To be fair, Telstra under Thodey have given us every possible indication that they're not going to be the Telstra to which we've become accustomed.

As AT&T told us with the whole iPad email thing, it's not their fault for not having a password by default, nor is it Android's fault for allowing Caller ID spoofing, it's the fault of the people who let the public know their voicemail wasn't safe.

Exactly. People only really care about the UI, and, in that, Apple is king.