melange

Barriers to market entry are a kind of vendor lock-in. We are locked in.

Gibberish.

There is no alternative URL to click on because a competitive global search engine would cost billions of dollars to build, the space is deeply encumbered by Google's giant patent portfolio, and the information used to build the index is to a great extent no longer available on the web.

That's why Bing is a distant second and there are no other players.

But why would such an expectation be reasonable? Surely once you have given the information away, it's their business what they do with it?

If there was a reference to support your claim, you would have provided one. As I said before - you're just making this stuff up.

Search is entirely locked in.

Given that Apple are nowhere near doing that and don't seem to be even going for that, why is that even a concern?

We have far more of a problem with Google in that regard, who do absolutely dominate search, and have clearly stated their wish to unseat Apple in order to have total dominance of mobile too.

Most people don't willingly give the information to Google or Facebook. They give it unwittingly.

Also, by your logic, it's not your information anymore - you have given it to Google and Facebook, which makes it their information to give to the government.

That is true. And is clearly true in the tablet space too (as well as PCs). It's just a lot more nuanced in both directions.

Android can have higher unit share and 'inferior' products while Apple can have higher profit share and the 'best' (single inflexible) product, almost indefinitely because they are satisfying different needs.

Which raises the question: where is there actual competition?

Clearly Samsung and Apple are competing for some of the same customers, but the overlap is small compared to the overall market.

Share is pretty much meaningless, and assumes a zero sum game of direct competition.

Surely Google and Facebook do this too. Why are we surprised that the government does it?

Please offer some kind of reference supporting your claim that the arm chip in the iPhone 5s is power inefficient.

This makes the front page whereas google being tried for wiretapping does not. No pro google bias here. Move along.

There is no such thing as an 'ARMv8' processor that can even be a 'power pig'. And you haven't given any reason why 1GB is not enough. You are just making this stuff up.

Are you seriously claiming that Apple kept the RAM below 1GB so that "Now has >1GB' could be their headline feature for next year?

Don't you remember the scandal around apple storing local data only on people's iphones? That was explicitly opted in-to.

It's fair because it's the same for everyone, and it's justified because it prevents a giant class of tax evasion scams.

A good marketing piece.

True but irrelevant to the parent's point.

Why does being first to put up a gas station matter? What stops other countries from putting up their own?

I'm sure that was done on purpose.

Where have I expressed outrage? Also you are clearly highly technology literate, so you understanding something is not representative of what regular users understand when they click through an agreement.

Because for years Google received unalloyed adoration from the tech community because they presented themselves as a genuinely better kind of company, but now that have shown themselves to be just another corporation that will say or do anything for profit, people are cynical about them.

It's only explicit if the user understands what they are agreeing to.

So are you really saying that apple contributed nothing at all to the modern smartphone?

But google doesn't anonymize the data.

Fair enough.

Honest reporting earns fewer eyeballs.

Yeah - imagine apple did this - there would be a scandal. But this is Google, so 'move along'.

Actually the rent is rapidly going through the roof, so don't expect it to last long.

Nobody is saying users are idiots or that there is no learning curve for some older people using iOS (I have introduced it to people in their 70s and 80s too).

The assertion is that the author is pretending to be an idiot in the way he is claiming the iOS7 is somehow worse than iOS6.

There are faults in iO7, but there is no evidence that it is harder for people to learn, and plenty of evidence that it is basically more usable.