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While Apple's install base is steadily growing, I still think they have a significant advantage in obscurity that grants them security.

i.e. Why do virus-writers target Windows? Sure, it has the largest install base, but Windows also runs a lot of servers and embedded systems. These two things are the real jackpots. What's taking control of one person's computer compared to taking control of a server with credit card information or a system running a billboard in Times square? Apple doesn't do embedded systems and their servers, while some do exist, are exceedingly rare.

Is security through obscurity enough though? That depends on who you are and how interesting your data is.

It's interesting that this article mentions Heisenberg. Although the Heisenberg uncertainty principle was formulated for quantum particles, it can be paraphrased as saying that measurements disturb the system being measured. It is perilous to apply quantum physics to the behavior and interactions of humans, but here I believe it is illustrative. Specifically, I think Shorris' study perturbed the system he was trying to measure while he was still in the process of trying to measure its different aspects.

Shorris' argues that the key to escaping poverty is the study of the humanities. His evidence is that a group of carefully selected students who, after being given a year of quality education, seem to be able to escape the poverty that entrapped them. Learning the humanities therefore provides a way out of poverty. While this is an uplifting, perhaps even inspirational message, the conclusions he draws are highly questionable for a plethora of reasons.

1. Response bias: Students expressing interest in the course are likely the most motivated individuals in their respective circles.

2. Selection bias: Students deemed "too impoverished" or "too uneducated" were rejected.

3. Intervention by study conductor: Education and career advice was not only given freely, but volunteered to promising pupils.

3. Variables not controlled: The education included high quality instructors who might have been capable of "inspiring" their students, regardless of the subject being taught, as well as providing an "in" to their respective institutions. Disruption of routine: Students were required to leave their immediate neighborhood and social circles regularly and engage in rigorous study.

4. No control group.

I could go on for a while, but this is sufficient. Shorris' study group consisted of the most highly motivated members of the poor minus those who were the least educated. He then intervened in their lives, not just to give them a quality education, but also by changing their habits, exposing them to the unfamiliar, enhancing their motivation and giving them career/education counseling plus networking connections to the educational institutes of the participating teachers.

I will not dispute that this course was a fantastic idea that enriched the lives of those lucky enough to take it, but it simply cannot be used as evidence for the notion that study of the humanities specifically can be used to combat poverty. Instead, it should be used a model for other similar courses.

Okay... This is kind of important:

The new Macbook Pro's use Apple's proprietary pentalobe screw.

That statement probably didn't rock your world, but it's one reason why I'm not buying a macbook pro. This screw has one purpose and one purpose only: to keep you out of your own laptop. The Air's have been using them for a while. You may think that you can get a driver when you need one, but it's not as easy as you think. Apple will not lend or sell you a pentalobe driver. They're probably actively trying to sue anyone who will. If you can get one, it will most likely be from an online source and take weeks to arrive.

Why is this bad?

Most users, myself included, don't plan for failure. Life is life. Stuff breaks. I can fix a lot of it. I've owned relatively few laptops over the years because I nurse them along into extreme obsolescence. I've spilled coffee on my laptops many times. If you power-down and remove the battery immediately and do some careful disassembly/cleaning you can rescue almost any laptop from a coffee spill no matter how much sugar and cream you take in your joe. Provided you have the tools to take it apart that is!

My air lasted exactly one spill. I couldn't remove the battery. I couldn't take it apart. Apple refused to do either for me. They made me wait 4 hours for an appointment so they could tell me it's now off warranty and offer to repair it for, I kid you not, more than I paid to buy the air new!

The end result is that my nice 2011 machine aluminum unibody air had a total life-time of less than a year. These devices may feel like they're built to last, but a device built to last is serviceable. The air's and now the pro's are built to be disposable.

First of all, this sort of paper pops up fairly frequently and, so far, none have stood up to peer review for long. There's probably an error somewhere in their proof.

Second, long distance communication and scalable networks cannot rely on direct point-to-point links. You can't build everyone a point to point link with each other and individual links, even for classical signals, can only extend for a few hundred kilometers before signal-to-noise drops so far that any known communication protocol breaks down completely. Yes, commercial quantum systems built to date do rely on point-to-point links, but quantum memory and quantum repeater networks (currently enjoying rapid improvement in research) will allow chained entanglement swapping through untrusted nodes, allowing quantum crypto to work in network topologies very similar to the existing internet. The method in the linked paper does not appear to permit this and would have to rely on trusted nodes at best.

In other words, even if it there isn't an error in their proof, they need to show that their technology can be expanded beyond trusted-point-to-trusted-point links in order for it to be of practical use.

One further note on hardware quality:

Perceived hardware quality is something Apple is fantastic at. Their laptops look and feel great. They feel like they'll last decades. This is misleading since they're actually built to be disposable. e.g. If you spill coffee on your Macbook Air, it's dead. You can't fix it because you can't remove the battery in a timely fashion and don't have the tools to open it. Apple won't fix it because their warranty doesn't cover spills. They won't even open it up and help you clean it up. They'll just tell you it's now off warranty and to kindly buy another or PFO. This is the big apple lie. Their stuff feels like heirlooms, but it's built to be binned at the first sign of trouble or obsolescence (or when the non-user-replaceable battery inevitably fails).

For some strange reason Apple has managed to put retina displays in their laptops before LG or Samsung (who probably manufacture those panels) manage to put them in their own laptops. While other laptop manufacturers are pretty timid about doing new things these days, they are getting faster at following in Apple's footsteps. We'll likely see Samsung or LG putting out their own laptops with retina displays within a few months. At least some of them will have proper screws that you actually own a screwdriver for.

Samsung really has the potential to be an industry leader. They make everything. SSD's, memory, displays, you name it. Some of their efforts (e.g. the Series 9) have actually been innovative in certain small and specific ways. It's frustrating to watch them sit back and let Apple do things "first" with their own parts though. Someone at Samsung is really dropping the ball and I hope they're shown the door soon.

I've spent a reasonable amount of time using Windows, Linux, and OSX. All of them suck. All of them are also awesome, at different things.

If you want an living room PC for entertainment, Windows is king. Neither Linux or OSX support Bluray properly and Windows still has a huge edge in gaming. Windows also supports the most hardware. That's become unimportant to most people, but if you work in a research lab with various oddball computer controlled devices around, you are often forced to work with Windows simply because that's the only OS supported by drivers for a lot of things.

OSX is the perfect OS for your mother. There's the one "Apple way" of doing things, so if she needs help it's easy to give her some. OSX gets decent battery life (on mac hardware) and still has a few Unix friendly features that haven't been locked away by Apple yet. If you're looking for a ghetto linux workstation, OSX will do in a pinch. I actually spent the better part of last year working under OSX on a Mac Book air. I've used Mac's off and on for decades and this is just the most recent stint (The MBA hardware lured me in this time). It worked, but the OS still puts up too much fight you when you try to customize it. OSX has also gotten rather buggy. I'm relieved to have retired it. As I said, while it would be great for my mother I personally detest OSX. Also, Mac hardware is moving away from the DIY crowd. e.g. The MBA's actually use proprietary screws to keep you out of your own laptop's innards. If you've ever saved a laptop from a coffee spill by disconnecting the battery and opening it up and doing a little cleaning, just bear in mind you won't be able to do that with most future macs.

Linux is bug central. Don't get me wrong, it's come a long way from the days when Slackware was king. You can install Ubuntu and almost everything will just work. The devil is in the details though, and if you have a low tolerance for flakiness you'll have to tweak away. However, no other OS is as powerful and flexible. If you want it to do X, it can do X in dozens of different ways. If the journey is as important as the destination for you, Linux is your OS.

Windows is all things to all people, but entertainment first and foremost. OSX is for your mother or people who would rather not use a real computer. Linux is for those who embrace the quest. Decide (and be honest with yourself) what kind of user you are and your OS preference will become clear, although what you are forced to use may be different. I currently use both Windows and Linux extensively, and occasionally help my Mom with OSX.

Although the linked article ignores certain MS OS's, like Win ME (for good reason), it does accurately convey the message that MS often does fairly innovative things that run against conventional wisdom and, in most cases, this has worked out rather well for them. MS spends way more on research than Apple and occasionally good things make it into MS products.

Even with that in mind, Metro is a pretty big gamble. They're trying to bring a unified experience across mobile and desktop devices when there are practically no mobile MS devices out there! It would be an ambitious idea if Windows phone (or tablet!) was well established and had a decent amount of market share but, as things stand, it's appears almost insane. MS is taking a huge risk with their core market to expand into markets that they're almost completely locked out of at present.

However, if you look at the trends in computing its absolutely true that more and more is being done on mobile devices, often at the expense of the desktop. The argument could be made that MS, as a company, would be in serious trouble if they just stuck to the desktop market. It very well might be "go big or go home" time for Microsoft, and they are clearly choosing to go big.

I say good luck to MS. I hope Metro lets them push into the mobile market without alienating their desktop core. It's better for consumers if there's more choice.

Say I decide to buy a new set of speakers. Do I tweet that I'm looking for speakers? Do I announce on facebook that I'm looking for speakers? Or do I just start googling?

Twitter and Facebook might occasionally be clued in about some of my purchases, but google is in on virtually all of my purchases that are considered while I'm at a computer. They're first past the post and privy to a much higher percentage of what I buy.

"Apple understand that the responsibility lies with their software to adapt to humans, not with humans to learn the ins and outs of unintuitive software."

This isn't how Apple does things.

Apple computers do not adapt to users. They do things in the "Apple Way". Users must learn that way or suffer.

The good thing about this complete refusal to adapt to users is that everyone has exactly the same Apple experience. You don't have to ask Apple users what shell or window manager they're using. This makes finding help easier and, in theory at least, should make it easier to eliminate bugs (Lion is actually very buggy). Arguably, small bugs and inconsistent behavior do more to confuse neophyte users than large interface flaws.

Apple's motto, "think different", should really be, "think like us". Is that good for the computer illiterate? Perhaps. Still, I'm a bit amazed that some power users put up with the rigidity of OSX and apparently seem to like it. I've used it off and on a few times over the last decade (I most recently used Lion for about a year) and it's always a relief to go back to an OS that is designed to adapt.