RI_Swamp_Yankee

I don't think they'd attempt it unless they had something that would disrupt the market. Intel has been rusting on its laurels without credible competition, and if Apple manages to steal a march on them with a new technology, that would be the impetus to bring it in-house.

That would put Intel in the crosshairs of anti-trust. The have a defacto monopoly on personal computer processors, and this sounds like an abuse of their market position to stifle innovation.

If Apple needs to, they could buy either Autodesk or Adobe. To be honest, I'd prefer the buy and port Solidworks.

Reminds me of the old "Fixing Solaris" file from the '90s (and the Fixing SunOS that was its forebear.)

ARM is a very compeitive field of a number of manufacturers, building chips for billions of devices. The advantage is no longer Intel's. More, the Great Old Ones - IBM with their zSeries and Power8 and now Oracle with SPARC of all things, are making a play for the server racks again. They're trapped between the massive economies of scale ARM is enjoying at the low end, and improvements in lowering cost and increasing yield for small batches of fancy and performant chips by the big R&D houses at the fat-margined high end.

The middle of the road is shrinking fast.

This is absolutely true. Worse, those brackets each define a different modal state. Even more worse, some languages ran out of brackets for all the purposes they wanted brackets for, so they invented their own - is there anything less thought-out than the double underscores in python? No, there is not.

In general, the reliance of syntax on random punctuation instead of meaningful symbols (a'la APL) or clear, human-parsable text is maddening - LISP and its derivatives do it far less than other modern languages, but still too much for my taste.

I'd also prefer clearly spelled-out syntax in this age of autocomplete rather than a jumble of weird abbreviations while I'm wishing for unicorns, and languages with code editors that do a good job of visually representing the flow of code rather than rely on punctuation, white-space or some unholy combination.

Programming seems kinda primitive compared to other aspects of computer-enabled content creation at times.

This is true, and MitM attacks are becoming less and less theoretical as more traffic moves to the various wireless protocols. Rogue AP's and cell towers are a thing in these modern times.

I have $50/month Unlimited data iPhone plan, and 0% financing on the iPhone itself over 2 years. Coverage is much improved recently, too.

Their marketing is terrible, and in-store customer service, while pleasant and eager to help, is painfully slow and inept. Fix that, and the pricing will drive customers to them.

> 1. Businesses would want features that individuals don't care about. More importantly, they would want features that I don't care about.

Yes, but they know you don't care about them, which is why they would pay you to care about them. This is what's called being a professional. As in literally being paid for your company's proven skill and expertise.

The MacOS X ecosystem is 25 years old now, counting NextStep, and has an installed base of close to a hundred million systems, most of them unsophisticated personal computer users running a full Unix operating system with internet access. That is a prime target, considering there are malicious exploits that take advantage of Z-series mainframes in recent years. (one of the Pirate Bay founders got popped for looting the mainframe at a tax accounting firm)

I think it's more to do with the development culture inside Apple. The features in Swift designed to improve secure coding shows you they're actively thinking about secuirty and how to achieve it, and have been for a while.

The only regular security headlines you see about the Mac is in the Pwn2Own contest and their like, where researchers trot out vicious exploits that are then dutifully squashed by Apple in the next update, never to be seen in the wild. (And there's a reason Apple makes it a PITA to install Flash and Java these days, and includes their own very nice .pdf reader.)

Apple has always been exceptional in this regard as well. It usually drives people up a wall when this is pointed out, as the fanboys like to trumpet it a bit too loudly, but it's true. In-the-wild exploits are rare, and the company moves quickly to squash them and to prevent the entire category of exploit from biting them a second time.

Firefox is Netscape. There's a reason you download it from Mozilla.org. It's an amazing demonstration of the power of open source to allow good software to exist and thrive beyond its original mission.

This is incorrect. The average user, globally, uses Android as their main OS. Desktops in developing nations are never going to reach the same level of ubiquity as in the US and Europe. AAA Gaming there will be console-driven as well.

Desktops in most applications are locked down to the point where they're dumb terminals to run Office and a browser, this is where MS rules, or creative/technical workstations, where Apple currently has a better story and is the only desktop maker growing market-share for the past couple years.