I have a great many criticisms of this deal but how many people would be better candidates for the role of a CTO managing the meeting of new 3D technology and hardware? A CTO has to cover all technology bases, not just hardware, so you can't just name some chip designer with no management experience. Carmack has been optimizing game engines with assembly since the dawn of the industry and is still hands-on having very recently been optimizing game engines on smartphones. He was also head of Armadillo aerospace where they had enormous amounts of custom machining and microcontroller work, you can deride that as "tinkering" if you like.

Google's work specifying and building the Nexus lines, the Chromebooks and their own custom motherboards for their servers, Google glass, their self-driving cars and their recent acquisition of the leading robotics companies also demonstrates how much hardware knowledge Google has. So you are wrong there too.

Facebook has been leading the open compute project and has significantly more hardware resources than people might think just using their web application. The point of buying the company is to get all the technology anyway, let's not forget in all this that they have a working prototype.

I'll agree they both have bad customer service though. But as a victim of Apple's bad hardware and customer service - they sold me an iPhone that had broken reception and didn't replace it for anyone outside of the US where there was a lawsuit - I would argue Apple doesn't really beat them there either.