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Article from 2009 announcing price cuts to iTunes music, mentions Apple has plans to go DRM free in the future:

http://www.computerworld.com/a...

From same article:

"While iTunes is the most popular digital music store, others have been faster to offer songs without copy protection. Amazon.com started selling DRM-free music in 2007 and swayed all the major labels to sign on in less than a year."

Awfully weird indeed.

Amazon started selling DRM-free music in September 2007

Apple started selling DRM-free music in April 2007 - https://www.apple.com/pr/library/2007/04/02Apple-Unveils-Higher-Quality-DRM-Free-Music-on-the-iTunes-Store.html

Ohh, and http://news.cnet.com/2100-1027-998590.html

> April 28, 2003 12:16 PM PDT
Apple unveils music store
...
The songs cost 99 cents each to download, with no subscription fee, and include the most liberal copying rights of any online service to date. Jobs has been an outspoken opponent of so-called digital rights management (DRM) in the past, arguing that limitations on digital music will undermine the market for legitimate content.

Two-thousand-fucking-three.

And streaming services have basically taken over music sales - sales from iTunes and other stores is far lower nowadays while streaming services like Pandora and others are rising.

Don't forget that iTunes has always offered streamed music "Internet Radio" for free, and now offers its own streaming service, iTunes Radio, which is adware, or ad-free with their iTunes Match subscription (which is, I believe, a "whopping" USD$25/year, and also has significant additional value, such as providing cloud-based storage for your music (including private storage for music that is NOT available on iTunes), thus freeing-up a significant storage-hit on your mobile devices).

The long term plan is to run iOS on laptops and desktops, or have you not been paying attention? This is why Apple has stopped caring about POSIX, and has put all of its efforts into the iOS runtime environment--UI, toolchain, etc. OS X is a second-class citizen.

Riiiight.

Apple isn't paying any attention to poor-old OS X. Neglected, it is... NOT!

And here's the list for Mavericks, released only a year earlier.

...And the list for Mountain Lion, only a year or so before Mavericks.

Now, let's see the comparable list for Windows 7 to 8.1, which covers MORE time (by far!) (2009 to 2014) than the time-period between OS X 10.8 to 10.10 (2012 to 2014).

So, keep on hating, hater. Meanwhile, Apple continues happily along, walking AND chewing-gum at the same time (significantly improving both OS X and iOS simultaneously).

The long term plan is to run iOS on laptops and desktops, or have you not been paying attention? This is why Apple has stopped caring about POSIX, and has put all of its efforts into the iOS runtime environment--UI, toolchain, etc. OS X is a second-class citizen.

Riiiight.

Apple isn't paying any attention to poor-old OS X. Neglected, it is... NOT!

And here's the list for Mavericks, released only a year earlier.

...And the list for Mountain Lion, only a year or so before Mavericks.

Now, let's see the comparable list for Windows 7 to 8.1, which covers MORE time (by far!) (2009 to 2014) than the time-period between OS X 10.8 to 10.10 (2012 to 2014).

So, keep on hating, hater. Meanwhile, Apple continues happily along, walking AND chewing-gum at the same time (significantly improving both OS X and iOS simultaneously).

The long term plan is to run iOS on laptops and desktops, or have you not been paying attention? This is why Apple has stopped caring about POSIX, and has put all of its efforts into the iOS runtime environment--UI, toolchain, etc. OS X is a second-class citizen.

Riiiight.

Apple isn't paying any attention to poor-old OS X. Neglected, it is... NOT!

And here's the list for Mavericks, released only a year earlier.

...And the list for Mountain Lion, only a year or so before Mavericks.

Now, let's see the comparable list for Windows 7 to 8.1, which covers MORE time (by far!) (2009 to 2014) than the time-period between OS X 10.8 to 10.10 (2012 to 2014).

So, keep on hating, hater. Meanwhile, Apple continues happily along, walking AND chewing-gum at the same time (significantly improving both OS X and iOS simultaneously).

The only reason they did that is because Amazon beat them to it and was taking their customers away. If not for competition, Apple never would have removed DRM.

2/6/2007
http://macdailynews.com/2007/0...

"The third alternative is to abolish DRMs entirely. Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music."

  "Perhaps those unhappy with the current situation should redirect their energies towards persuading the music companies to sell their music DRM-free. For Europeans, two and a half of the big four music companies are located right in their backyard. The largest, Universal, is 100% owned by Vivendi, a French company. EMI is a British company, and Sony BMG is 50% owned by Bertelsmann, a German company. Convincing them to license their music to Apple and others DRM-free will create a truly interoperable music marketplace. Apple will embrace this wholeheartedly."

5/30/2007

Apple starts selling DRM free music

https://www.apple.com/pr/libra...

9/25/2007
Amazon starts selling DRM free music,
http://readwrite.com/2007/09/2...

As you were saying?

Aperture (yes it's on an Apple Mac) is the best thing I ever tried to organize / rate / tag index / enhance etc... pictures.

https://www.apple.com/support/...

No - it's Microsoft's incarnation of Apple's AppNap feature. (think of it as an aggressive and automatic version of the *nix renice function with a suspend feature latched onto it.)

Sounds a lot like the Android platform things that's been around for awhile. You configure battery life left, and a bunch of stuff that you can limit if its below that point.

No - it's Microsoft's incarnation of Apple's AppNap feature.
(think of it as an aggressive and automatic version of the *nix renice function with a suspend feature latched onto it.)

The corporate build of Apple OSX that's used by employees has a "corporate key" for filevault.

Yes, and every computer I deploy at my company has a Institutional Recovery Key for its FileVault encryption (we do a combined Institutional/Personal deployment). This is a key I generated on-site, and is only stored locally (in a very secure manner)

If an employee is walking around with a company-issued machine, and storing company-owned data, of course the company is going to use tools to make sure it can access any/all data on the machine if something happens to the user.

This has nothing to do with my personal iPhone, and even less to do with the US Constitution.

Your comment is a complete red herring.

More information on what Apple is using: http://training.apple.com/pdf/...

Sounds like you have zero experience administering large groups of iPads.

Here's a clue:
http://www.apple.com/ipad/busi...

I have no idea what educational aid an iPad contains besides maybe text books

Fix your ignorance. Here's a start:
http://www.apple.com/education...
http://www.educationdive.com/n...
http://www.educatorstechnology...

A lot of this stuff can't be done on a Chromebook.

"CoreOS" is the kernel and UNIX services layer of iOS and Mac OS X.

Actually, Core OS is.

Yeah....

That's funny, I didn't realize that programs such as Autocad, Autodesk Sketchbook, Pixelmator, Adobe Lightroom, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Pinnacle Studio, etc. were for consuming content. They seem to be for creating content to me. That isn't even scratching the surface of all the content creation apps that exist for iOS.

That's funny, I didn't realize that programs such as Autocad, Autodesk Sketchbook, Pixelmator, Adobe Lightroom, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Pinnacle Studio, etc. were for consuming content. They seem to be for creating content to me. That isn't even scratching the surface of all the content creation apps that exist for iOS.

That's funny, I didn't realize that programs such as Autocad, Autodesk Sketchbook, Pixelmator, Adobe Lightroom, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Pinnacle Studio, etc. were for consuming content. They seem to be for creating content to me. That isn't even scratching the surface of all the content creation apps that exist for iOS.

That's funny, I didn't realize that programs such as Autocad, Autodesk Sketchbook, Pixelmator, Adobe Lightroom, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Pinnacle Studio, etc. were for consuming content. They seem to be for creating content to me. That isn't even scratching the surface of all the content creation apps that exist for iOS.

That's funny, I didn't realize that programs such as Autocad, Autodesk Sketchbook, Pixelmator, Adobe Lightroom, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Pinnacle Studio, etc. were for consuming content. They seem to be for creating content to me. That isn't even scratching the surface of all the content creation apps that exist for iOS.

That's funny, I didn't realize that programs such as Autocad, Autodesk Sketchbook, Pixelmator, Adobe Lightroom, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Pinnacle Studio, etc. were for consuming content. They seem to be for creating content to me. That isn't even scratching the surface of all the content creation apps that exist for iOS.

That's funny, I didn't realize that programs such as Autocad, Autodesk Sketchbook, Pixelmator, Adobe Lightroom, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Pinnacle Studio, etc. were for consuming content. They seem to be for creating content to me. That isn't even scratching the surface of all the content creation apps that exist for iOS.

That's funny, I didn't realize that programs such as Autocad, Autodesk Sketchbook, Pixelmator, Adobe Lightroom, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Pinnacle Studio, etc. were for consuming content. They seem to be for creating content to me. That isn't even scratching the surface of all the content creation apps that exist for iOS.

I'm assuming you made an error and meant OS X Mavericks, not OS X March?

Yes, Mavericks. Not sure what freudian slip caused that.

Even if so, you're absolutely wrong. Mavericks and Yosemite can run on any MBP (Macbook Pro) from 2007 on.

http://support.apple.com/en-us...

Ok, that's interesting.

Now Check:
http://support.apple.com/en-us...

"
MacBook Pro (13-inch, Mid-2009 or later),
MacBook Pro (15-inch or 17-inch, Mid/Late 2007 or later)
"

They are explicitly excluding the early 09' and earlier MBP 13" with Mavericks, while Yosemite doesn't mention that.

Now I'm curious if its actually supported by Yosemite or not.

Most of the Macs with 32-bit EFIs can easily run Yosemite, albeit not officially. I'm running Yosemite on my 2006 Mac Pro 1,1. It runs great and was very easy to install.

I hear you, but being able to make it work, and it being supported are worlds apart. Apple dropped support for it. Its not pleasant being in that position, even if you can "make it work".

Apple dropped the Xserve entirely--they stopped selling Xserves and announced the end of the line, what, 4 years ago? Too bad, IMHO, but announced and expected.

People buying servers do not expect support to drop that quickly. Just because apple disco'd producing the line doesn't mean that support for the ones they did sell should end quicker.

Nope. Apple has in no way "dropped support" for any laptops still under warranty or support contract.

Nobody said they did. But many computers 4 years old were not being supported when mavericks came out. That's all the OP claimed, and all I confirmed.

Bottom line, with Apple once the apple care runs out, your guess is as good as mine whether anything that comes out thereafter will be supported on your system. It might be. It might be something you can shoehorn on yourself without official support. Or it might not be at all. That's not FUD.

I'm no saying other vendors or that OSS is necessarily better, but lets not put Apple on a pedestal and say that it IS better. Because its really not.

I'm assuming you made an error and meant OS X Mavericks, not OS X March?

Yes, Mavericks. Not sure what freudian slip caused that.

Even if so, you're absolutely wrong. Mavericks and Yosemite can run on any MBP (Macbook Pro) from 2007 on.

http://support.apple.com/en-us...

Ok, that's interesting.

Now Check:
http://support.apple.com/en-us...

"
MacBook Pro (13-inch, Mid-2009 or later),
MacBook Pro (15-inch or 17-inch, Mid/Late 2007 or later)
"

They are explicitly excluding the early 09' and earlier MBP 13" with Mavericks, while Yosemite doesn't mention that.

Now I'm curious if its actually supported by Yosemite or not.

Most of the Macs with 32-bit EFIs can easily run Yosemite, albeit not officially. I'm running Yosemite on my 2006 Mac Pro 1,1. It runs great and was very easy to install.

I hear you, but being able to make it work, and it being supported are worlds apart. Apple dropped support for it. Its not pleasant being in that position, even if you can "make it work".

Apple dropped the Xserve entirely--they stopped selling Xserves and announced the end of the line, what, 4 years ago? Too bad, IMHO, but announced and expected.

People buying servers do not expect support to drop that quickly. Just because apple disco'd producing the line doesn't mean that support for the ones they did sell should end quicker.

Nope. Apple has in no way "dropped support" for any laptops still under warranty or support contract.

Nobody said they did. But many computers 4 years old were not being supported when mavericks came out. That's all the OP claimed, and all I confirmed.

Bottom line, with Apple once the apple care runs out, your guess is as good as mine whether anything that comes out thereafter will be supported on your system. It might be. It might be something you can shoehorn on yourself without official support. Or it might not be at all. That's not FUD.

I'm no saying other vendors or that OSS is necessarily better, but lets not put Apple on a pedestal and say that it IS better. Because its really not.

Well, I guess if Yosemite runs on YOUR six year old Mac you must be right, and anything anyone else says must be FUD.

FUD is when people made false statements to try to prove their point. As an example of FUD, here's your statement:

Then again, OSX March was released in 2013, and dropped support for early-2009 13-inch Mac Book Pros.

I'm assuming you made an error and meant OS X Mavericks, not OS X March? Even if so, you're absolutely wrong. Mavericks and Yosemite can run on any MBP (Macbook Pro) from 2007 on. So, maybe you made a second typo and had really meant 2009 MacBooks (not Pros)? Alas, Mavericks/Yosemite (they have the same system requirements) will run on early-2009 Mac Books, as well. So, you're basically just entirely wrong. Here's the Apple support page if you don't believe me: http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT6412.

I do think it's worth noting that the Intel macs that are not supported are either 32-bit only or computers with 32-bit EFI. Mavericks and Yosemite are 64-bit only, so the 32-bit processors computers are out. Most of the Macs with 32-bit EFIs can easily run Yosemite, albeit not officially. I'm running Yosemite on my 2006 Mac Pro 1,1. It runs great and was very easy to install.

So, just to make it perfectly clear to you, they've ALREADY dropped support for a laptop that's a year NEWER than your computer, being dropped by OS that's already a year and a half old.

Nope. Apple has in no way "dropped support" for any laptops still under warranty or support contract. They merely do not support the older Macs with the latest version of the Operating system. The minimally supported systems are still at least 4-5 years old and 7+ years old in many cases (like my own). Works for me.

Mavericks (and Yosemite) also dropped support for any Xserve's older than 2009 (so server class hardware got dropped after just 4 years of support), and any mac mini's older than 2009 got dropped as well.

Apple dropped the Xserve entirely--they stopped selling Xserves and announced the end of the line, what, 4 years ago? Too bad, IMHO, but announced and expected.

Operator overloading is, IMO, almost inherently a mistake. And tuples are pure syntactic sugar.

  don't like operator overloading either but you can't just hand wave t away as syntax sugar because you don't like it.

Also tuples are way beyond what I consider syntax sugaring as they replace quite a lot of parameter nonsense and lots of extra method definitions because of elements being optional.

The entire networking stack has no Swift documentation except for a very trivial NSURLSession example.

NSURLConnection seems to have full Swift documentation (though it doesn't show up by default under all for some reason).

Or you could just use one of the countless online examples of networking with Swift, even the AlamoFire library written by the same guy that did AFNetworking...

The conceptual docs for pretty much every technology area, for starters. You can say all you want to that the language doesn't matter in conceptual docs, but IMO, that's not the case if you truly don't know any Objective-C

I still disagree with that but even if it were so you can find any conceptual based thing you want online now from other sources that is very Swift specific. In particular Ray Wenderlich and company have been really prolific in churning out Swift guides for all kinds of topics.

you have to admit that Apple has a long history of coming up with what seems like revolutionary improvements in technology, and then dropping them a couple of years laterâ"Objective-C Garbage Collection, for example.

GC on ObjC was never revolutionary, it was added on because everyone else had it - ARC was a much better idea, and they aren't dropping that. I don't see a history of Apple dropping much of anything as all other frameworks and technologies they've developed have pretty much stayed and evolved. Can you provide any other example, because I con't think of any that I was using that ever got dropped... hell, even iCloud document support which has historically had a ton of issues is still there, evolving and iterating...

I won't be using it for any nontrivial code until I'm sure it is going to stick..

The canaries on that one are already deep inside and chirping loudly still. Anyone who is not switching to Swift now as rapidly as they can is going to be behind the curve in terms of modern iOS development.

A guy named something like Hillgass or Hillegass used to put out really good books on Objective-C.

That's this guy.

He's pretty awesome, so is his training outfit.

I read his first iOS book, then attended the advanced iOS class at BNR.

Definitely a good start.

However, as is always the case, most of the education comes after the classes end.

As far as Swift/ObjC?

As was mentioned earlier, the API/SDK is the big learning part. That can take a couple of years. I feel as if I am just up to speed in the last year on this stuff, and I took my last class (in ObjC) about two years ago.

I learned Swift pretty quickly. Luckily, I already have a good handle on the API.

There's a pretty good chance that any iOS programming that you learn from now on will be in Swift. The API is almost identical between Swift and Objective-C.

The big difference is that you can be more casual in Swift. For example, Core Foundation memory management is handled transparently in Swift, but not in ObjC.

I would say that you are probably better off learning ObjC first, but don't put off learning Swift. It's quite possible to learn both at the same time.

However, this post is an empirical one, based on fact, reason, and personal experience. I fully expect it to get buried amongst the "Fanboi/Apple SUX" arguments that always permeate these Dice clickbait posts.

1. looking at the "nuts and bolts" issues - pros and cons of each language. The problem with that is that you don't have enough experience to properly evaluate the answers. I know, it's a catch-22 - if you had that experience, you wouldn't be asking, right? Which brings us to:

2. stepping back and looking at methodologies - the hows of developing maintainable code, refactoring, etc. The problem with this is that, until you have some language experience, all this is theoretical and won't mean much to you except as abstract ideas. Which brings us to:

3. arguing for different platforms -- iThingies vs AndroidThingies - and one of the advantages of Android that I haven't seen anyone mention is that you don't need to know C or C++ or ObjectiveC/ObjectionableC. Just a subset of Java (language syntax, some boilerplate for how to make a class, the manifest files, resources, and a few other things). As a bonus, you can develop for free on any laptop, put any android phone into dev mode, and load/run your app on your phone quicker than you can launch it in the emulator. And no license fees. (cue everyone who says the average iPhone app earns more than the average Android app. The fact is that most earn either nothing or less than $100/month - see my post here with links to citations). Which brings us to:

4. taking a step back and asking "Do I really want to do this?" "What else can I do?" "What really floats my boat?" Maybe you'll decide that, until you get that sorted out, you want to take a (probably low-paying, but with your degree, who knows where that will lead) job at some humanitarian organization that will give you a different perspective on life while you brush up on your code skills in your spare time.

Before you do decide to get into it, I'd suggest taking a few weeks to learn Java first (plain Java, not Android), even if you decide to go into iThing apps - not only is there still a demand for Java developers, but it will give you the basics of OOP, which you'll need anyway, the syntax is pretty much the same as the C family of languages, you don't have to worry too much about this, and there are plenty of free tools out there. You should be able to get started with a simple "Hello, world!" command-line Java program your first hour.

https://www.apple.com/recycling/ipod-cell-phone/

Now what do you suggest I do?

Get a real phone.

Hey, now that the systemd nutters have broken Linux we can go back to calling Unix Unix instead of *nix.

At least one trademarked Unix uses a launch-on-demand-based init daemon, so it's not clear that the use of systemd-the-daemon is sufficient to make Linux not be a Un*x. Maybe systemd-the-software-bundle is sufficient.

It changes the user space sufficiently that the historical text configuration files for logging and other facilities no longer function compatibly with the VSC test suite. If those were changed back, or the test suite was somehow made independent of configuration variances for the purposes of testing, I might agree with you, but as it is, there is no way a systemd based system would pass VSC, and would also likely fail VSX, and the parts of the VSTH and VSRT testing, based on the posix_spawn implementation and XPG/4 compliance.

Hey, now that the systemd nutters have broken Linux we can go back to calling Unix Unix instead of *nix.

At least one trademarked Unix uses a launch-on-demand-based init daemon, so it's not clear that the use of systemd-the-daemon is sufficient to make Linux not be a Un*x. Maybe systemd-the-software-bundle is sufficient.

Most big data is videos, photo and audio which are played sequentially or in big enough chunks like one photo at the time that random access times and IOPS don't matter, a defragged hard drive is simply perfect for the task.

Err, no. Depends on what kind of video you're doing. In the video world it's easy to end up bottlenecked by disk I/O.

HD resolution ProRes files for instance will tax any hard drive, requiring over 40MB/s (330mbs) throughput:
https://documentation.apple.co...

I'm working with 4K sources, of which some are uncompressed. You need RAID or SSD.

http://www.apple.com/mac-pro/

• iOS security whitepaper describes how is iOS and related technologies hardened against attacks. iMessage specifically is fully end-to-end encrypted with Apple never being in possession of messages' cleartext or the keys to decipher them.
• Data on devices with iOS 8 on them not being accessible even by Apple. FBI and DoJ are up in arms about this and resorting to "think of the children" by scaring us how Apple devices will now be the choice of pedophiles and kidnapers. (To be honest, this ain't an Apple exclusive, as Google now provides this functionality in Android, so at least some Android devices are safe from being broken into.) Just be sure to disable unlock-with-fingerprint.
• Safari on both OS X and iOS having the option to use non-user-tracking service DuckDuckGo as the search engine (I have set it up as the search engine on all my machines).

There are other measures; detailed privacy policy is found at https://www.apple.com/privacy/ and its subpages. For a while, a link to this page was prominently featured on Apple's front page. They're serious about it.
So yeah, if there's a significant market value in providing privacy-conscious products (that is, consumers recognize its value), then companies will react accordingly. Clearly, it ain't a full solution, but it'll be a significant force in tilting back the playing field somewhat.

• iOS security whitepaper describes how is iOS and related technologies hardened against attacks. iMessage specifically is fully end-to-end encrypted with Apple never being in possession of messages' cleartext or the keys to decipher them.
• Data on devices with iOS 8 on them not being accessible even by Apple. FBI and DoJ are up in arms about this and resorting to "think of the children" by scaring us how Apple devices will now be the choice of pedophiles and kidnapers. (To be honest, this ain't an Apple exclusive, as Google now provides this functionality in Android, so at least some Android devices are safe from being broken into.) Just be sure to disable unlock-with-fingerprint.
• Safari on both OS X and iOS having the option to use non-user-tracking service DuckDuckGo as the search engine (I have set it up as the search engine on all my machines).

There are other measures; detailed privacy policy is found at https://www.apple.com/privacy/ and its subpages. For a while, a link to this page was prominently featured on Apple's front page. They're serious about it.
So yeah, if there's a significant market value in providing privacy-conscious products (that is, consumers recognize its value), then companies will react accordingly. Clearly, it ain't a full solution, but it'll be a significant force in tilting back the playing field somewhat.

Maybe you used to, you can't now.

Yes you can.

http://support.apple.com/en-us...

the general expectation is that a service will be running when it needs to be running.

And this expectation can be filled with something like Apple's launchd (open source) which has the ability to spawn or respawn jobs on demand; or monitor them and reload them if they die, throttled in case of crash.

So, patch the files, then kill the process. launchd then respawns it. Downtime? Less than a second. No reboot needed. The user can be notified by a box saying "The patch has been installed successfully" with a big green check mark.

1. generate a certificate, and add it to the system keychain
2. sign modified kext with new certificate, using the kext signing process outlined 5 months ago at WWDC
3. ???
4. Profit!

i bought my macbook with same reasoning in mind but just recently started face this issue with my model along with atleast 8000 people who posted here. https://discussions.apple.com/...

The real problem here, as I see it, is that the developer of the TRIM enabler is writing bug reports that request a ridiculously complex solution that doesn't make much sense, rather than a very trivial solution that does.

The right way to solve this problem would be for Apple to add a single line of code that checks for a magic value in the device tree, and enables TRIM support if it finds it. Then, the TRIM enabler could write a codeless kext for any devices whose TRIM support seems to work, whose sole purpose is to add that magic value into the device tree, that matches at a higher priority than the Apple driver, modifies the device tree, and walks away from the table, allowing the Apple driver to attach, see the flag, and use TRIM support.

Heck, there's probably a flag like that in there already. Just looking at the device tree for my Apple-branded drive in 10.9, I see something pretty glaring:

"IOStorageFeatures" = {"Unmap"=Yes}

and thirty seconds later, found the documentation for that key here. Chances are, if you write a codeless kext that modifies the device tree to add this property to the device, and if you get your matching correct, the unmodified Apple driver will magically enable TRIM support. If so, then you just need to get a proper signing key from Apple, sign the codeless kext, and you're done. If not, file a bug asking for that approach (or a similar approach with a different key) to work.

If that approach doesn't work, then and only then should you even think about writing an actual chunk of kernel code.

Apple should find a way to sign these

They did, at WWDC 2013. More to the point, I wonder why the Trim Enabler dev isn't signing his kext? Are there legitimate reasons, like he needs a special kind of thing that can't be signed using the provided tools, or is it because he doesn't want to pay for a dev license to sign the software he's selling? In a vacuum of information, there's not much point in speculating.

People replace HDDs in macs, they need to support it.

Why? Is TRIM empirically faster on your drive, or is this something you think you need?

they're about as far from "laptop" as you can get

No they aren't

Mac Pro
Alienware 18

The Tianhe-2 is about as far from a laptop as you can get. The Mac Pro is almost identical to a gaming laptop.

All of those hoops are removed if the app is signed by an Apple 'enterprise deployment' certificate. Someone anyone can get just by asking.

Bzzzt! Wrong!

You have to be Registered as an "Enterprise" Developer; which is a different level from the regular $99/yr. iOS Dev. Registration.

And since that means these Apps are "signed", it should be about 5 seconds before their Cert. was revoked by Apple.

One thing I wish more devs would do is the universal IAP unlock.

This use of in-app purchases appears to be forbidden by Apple's App Store Review Guidelines:

11.1 Apps that unlock or enable additional features or functionality with mechanisms other than the App Store will be rejected
11.2 Apps utilizing a system other than the In-App Purchase API (IAP) to purchase content, functionality, or services in an App will be rejected
11.3 Apps using IAP to purchase physical goods or goods and services used outside of the App will be rejected
...
11.13 Apps that link to external mechanisms for purchases or subscriptions to be used in the App, such as a "buy" button that goes to a web site to purchase a digital book, will be rejected
11.14 Apps can read or play approved content (specifically magazines, newspapers, books, audio, music, video and cloud storage) that is subscribed to or purchased outside of the App, as long as there is no button or external link in the App to purchase the approved content. Apple will only receive a portion of revenues for content purchased inside the App

Enabling features of an iOS app through an external purchase is forbidden by 11.1, 11.2, and 11.13, and enabling features of a not-iOS app through an iOS IAP is forbidden by 11.3. There is an exception in 11.14 for noninteractive cultural works and leased remote storage, but that doesn't appear to cover most app or game functionality.

but we all know what will usually happen is that most students will spend their time chatting online, playing video games, etc.

Now only if there was some way to manage a device to not allow ad hoc app installs, or disable functionality you don't want the user to have...

Do you really think that people haven't thought of that years ago when they first started doing this?

The one gotcha here is that iOS app publishers aren't allowed to use "demo" in the title or description (App Store Review Guidelines 2.9). Then the problem becomes how to express how much story is in the free portion without either using "demo" or spoiling the collapse of the city's roof. Would it be enough to use the following in the description? "This app contains the first few hours of the game, which take place in Midgar. The rest of the game is available as a one-time in-app purchase of $x.xx."

IRC, jabber and xabber. Good IM clients with integrated support for a bunch of protocols and servers exist for every device I've ever heard of (with the possible exception of iPhones due to Apple's 'we hate you' policy towards users)

Nice Try, Hater.

Not only is Cisco Jabber available for iOS, and according to Xabber's Blog, Xabber is currently in development for iOS; but In about 2 seconds of Googling, I found FOUR iOS IRC Clients:

Palaver

Colloquy

LimeChat

Turbo IRC

There may (probably are) more; but those are sufficient to put your little rant to rest...

IRC, jabber and xabber. Good IM clients with integrated support for a bunch of protocols and servers exist for every device I've ever heard of (with the possible exception of iPhones due to Apple's 'we hate you' policy towards users)

Nice Try, Hater.

Not only is Cisco Jabber available for iOS, and according to Xabber's Blog, Xabber is currently in development for iOS; but In about 2 seconds of Googling, I found FOUR iOS IRC Clients:

Palaver

Colloquy

LimeChat

Turbo IRC

There may (probably are) more; but those are sufficient to put your little rant to rest...

IRC, jabber and xabber. Good IM clients with integrated support for a bunch of protocols and servers exist for every device I've ever heard of (with the possible exception of iPhones due to Apple's 'we hate you' policy towards users)

Nice Try, Hater.

Not only is Cisco Jabber available for iOS, and according to Xabber's Blog, Xabber is currently in development for iOS; but In about 2 seconds of Googling, I found FOUR iOS IRC Clients:

Palaver

Colloquy

LimeChat

Turbo IRC

There may (probably are) more; but those are sufficient to put your little rant to rest...