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http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa366778(v=vs.85).aspx#physical_memory_limits_windows_7 No Windows 7 Home Premium OEM 16 GB cheap box for dev soon :)

What's your definition of "cheap"? Yeah, Microsoft charges USD 200 for Windows 7 Home Premium retail, but HP's selling a 16GB system for $1,269.99 with Windows 7 Home Premium.

Hell, if we don't require Windows, even the company everybody likes to beat up for making horrible overpriced machines will sell you a 16GB Core i5 iMac for USD 2100 (1TB disk rather than the 750GB disk on the HP, but a 2.7GHz quad-core Core i5 rather than a Core i7-2600 quad-core "up to 3.8GHz" with Turbo-Hydramatic, err, sorry, Turbo-Boost).

4GB (two 2GB SO-DIMMs) of 1333MHz DDR3 memory; two SO-DIMM slots support up to 8GB

Yes, clearly we have all been brainwashed into buying into a stable, modern, graphical operating system that runs commercial (i.e. useful) software, has Terminal capabilities and more efficiency than any other OS. Silly us.

Clearly it's getting more unstable, going from It doesn't crash to having KB articles like this. You might still be in denial but it's obvious Apple are acknowledging that stability is slipping.

Not saying there's anything wrong with OSX (the integration with multitouch touchpads is brilliant) but harping on about it's deteriorating stability just draws attention to an aspect of the OS that has gotten worse (also see all the complaints Lion has gotten on the forums).

Yes, clearly we have all been brainwashed into buying into a stable, modern, graphical operating system that runs commercial (i.e. useful) software, has Terminal capabilities and more efficiency than any other OS. Silly us.

Clearly it's getting more unstable, going from It doesn't crash to having KB articles like this. You might still be in denial but it's obvious Apple are acknowledging that stability is slipping.

Not saying there's anything wrong with OSX (the integration with multitouch touchpads is brilliant) but harping on about it's deteriorating stability just draws attention to an aspect of the OS that has gotten worse (also see all the complaints Lion has gotten on the forums).

Since when do "open source" software vendors try to prevent people from using their software in whatever manner they want?

Since a long long time. Apple, Oracle, Microsoft, are all "open source software vendors". And they all "prevent people from using their software in whatever manner they want".

Whoever broke into this had no idea how lame most directors meetings are. This is a simple but overpriced collaboration and calendar app for 70 year olds, with a 24 hour help desk. Nice, uncluttered GUI.

The main corporate secrets that filter up to board members involve mergers, acquisitions, and firing the CEO. Knowing about M&A activity early has trading value; not much else does. M&A activity is so slow right now that it's barely worth following.

Incidentally, this is "cloud-based". NASDAQ runs the "cloud". The client is available as an iPhone app. Competitors include BoardVantage and PWC Board Center.

My god you are *totally* full of shit! (I'll bite: the Mach Kernel was created in a Uni lab by Avadis Tevanian, Jobs hired him immediately when NeXT started up in 1986 and used it as the NeXSTSTEP OS kernel, Apple buys NeXT, continues to develop Mach, and also replaces the driver layer with a modern O-O C++ implementation called IOKit. All of this old and new code is open source, and frankly pisses all over the Linux driver model of copy and paste development--Linux kernel is design free zone). http://opensource.apple.com/

2. As a geek ...

You are simply *thick*. Fuck off and learn some history.

To be honest, just being able to link to stuff doesn't prove your point either. Lag is a very subjective thing and many people interpret almost anything whatsoever as "lag", and never stop to think what could be causing it. For example, googling "iphone lag" produces plenty of stuff:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1608445?start=0&tstart=0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ui9bPJfeRoM
http://www.iphonedevsdk.com/forum/iphone-sdk-development/59048-how-reduce-lag.html
http://techgeeks-online.com/2010/eliminating-lag-on-iphone-ipod-touch/
http://techgeeks-online.com/2010/eliminating-lag-on-iphone-ipod-touch/
http://www.wowza.com/forums/showthread.php?7745-How-to-reduce-Iphone-live-Latency
http://www.ifans.com/forums/showthread.php?t=37347

Does that mean that there's some inherent lag to it, or could it just be that... well, people are whining over misconceptions and issues they caused themselves?

Mac Mini: $599
iPod Touch: $199
iOS developer account that can publish to the iTunes store: $99

Total: $897

$897 seems to be less than $1250. Also, you can just use the iOS simulator in Xcode if you're really scraping by, and cut the iPod Touch out, for a total entry cost of less than $700.

It's also a travesty that there is nowhere to buy refurbished Macs, or used Macs at a discount that work perfectly.

Thanks for playing.

You do of course also have to replace a PC every few years if that's your development platform.

Then perhaps I should charge the difference between the cheapest PC and the cheapest Mac. For example, compare a $1000 MacBook to an (admittedly heavier) $400 laptop running Windows. That's still $600 for a Mac.

For Android it's $25 per year to get on the Google Android Market.

Since when? I was told $0 to unlock adb install, $25 for the first year on Android Market, and $0 for each additional year.

I don't know about the icons, but most laptops these days are glossy because that's what people tend to buy. This isn't something that started with tablets.

He's talking about the shine on the icons themselves. First used with the iPhone, icons have a light swooping shadow / shine applied to them by the OS. The app developer can turn it off if they desire by setting a property that says the icon already has a shine applied to it's image.

It makes them look like 3 dimensional rounded buttons and is recommended for consistency unless your icon has a non-reflective surface represented on it such as paper or leather. I'm not sure if anyone else applied gloss or shine effects to icon surfaces before Apple.

Looking at some Samsung icons I only see the Photos app using an identical shine, the Phone icon uses a shine but it's diagonal and not curved. The other icons are flat without shine.

Here. Check out that link, it's a very nice design document that gives great examples, I've learned a lot about interface design reading Apple's docs.

No $5B is revenue for computers according to 3Q 2011 reports. It is estimated that they made $1.5B on computers as Apple doesn't seem to show profit by product line in the quarterly reports. For the whole company, Apple announced something on the order of $7B in profit.

There is a difference between having the most sales which HP and Dell care about and having the most profit. Apple would rather chase 5% of the market and make more profit than Dell (which they did last quarter) than fight with Dell, HP, and Lenovo for 95% of the low profit side. According to Apple's 3Q report, they made over $14B in revenue on iPhone/iPad sales (does not include iPod sales) with an estimated $4.2B in profit. Their iTunes music, video, books, apps and iPod accessories pulled in $1.6B in revenue. At best that would be $480M after the content owners take their cut. So according to you Apple is more concerned about $500M in iTunes revenue than the $14+ B in hardware revenue. They are so concerned that they pushed for music to be DRM free. Currently what is stopping Apple users from buying music on Amazon and putting it on their iOS devices? What is stopping Samsung users from buying iTunes music and putting it on their Galaxy phones?

You're absolutely right with the first part but it is idiotic to assume that it's only MS or Apple

I did not say nor did I assume that they are the only ones running this campaign. They however are running a concerted anti-competitive campaign against open source software and even Microsoft has said that they will do this if they start to lose footing in the marketplace against open source software.

Wait Apple is against open source code? Why do they contribute so much to it then? They own and maintain CUPS and haven't closed sourced it. They contribute all the Darwin code to an open source license despite the origins being BSD and not requiring them to. They created Bonjour and open sourced it. They wrote Webkit2 including all the awesome multi-threading and process separation stuff right in the library so all applications that use Web rendering can use it (instead of implementing it in the browser code like Google did in Chrome did and making it hard for others to re-implement). Here's a nice list of about 800 open source projects Apple actively contributes to. You can easily support the assertion that Apple is invested in sfotware patents as much as anyone, but to try to make them out as anti-open source is just demonstrating a lack of information.

if icloud goes down then you lose all of them

Nope, I can still play music, or see videos, or use apps that have had data synced by iCloud.

You can do all of those things on a blackberry if BES or BIS services go down too, that's no different.

For example 'Find my friends' when icloud goes down?

Yes, that is not part of iCloud.

Except that it is, and it's really really easy to find that out yet somehow you seem incapable of it.

They removed Samba, but their replacement sucks. For example, my printer can write to an SMB share - Windows or Samba - but it won't write to one that 10.7 exports, because 10.7 doesn't support the authentication mechanism that it wants to use.

So why would a printer (in the sense of "a device with a toner cartridge, a paper path, and a laser that writes to a selenium-coated roller") need to write to an SMB share? Or are you talking about an SMB client talking to your printer?

If it's really writing to an SMB share, hopefully Apple's new SMB server gets open-sourced at some point, so the people who actually want LM or other crufty old easily-crackable authentication mechanism, or can't be bothered implementing NTLMSSP, can go backport them and work with crappy old SMB implementations (and so that vendors of printers and NAS boxes who don't want GPLed code in their devices can use a server over which Apple and the rest of the community have at least some influence, rather than some random lump of software whose interaction with {pick your client} ends up needing an additional pile of debugging).

If it's talking to an SMB client, the client's been open-source for a while, so if you need to enable crufty old authentication mechanisms, you can.

http://www.apple.com/batteries/iphone.html "Use iPhone Regularly For proper maintenance of a lithium-based battery, it’s important to keep the electrons in it moving occasionally. Be sure to go through at least one charge cycle per month (charging the battery to 100% and then completely running it down )." "Use Your iPad Regularly For proper reporting of the battery’s state of charge, be sure to go through at least one charge cycle per month (charging the battery to 100% and then completely running it down)."

"keep the electrons moving." That is so typical of Apple: dumb things down so even a moron will think he understands it.

In any event, as another poster pointed out, that has nothing to do with maximizing the longevity of the battery: in fact, it's going to lessen the total number of charge/discharge cycles that you get. I don't know of any chemical system whereby periodic deep cycling is considered good for the cells (even Ni-Cads: the memory effect is real, but you still don't need to deep cycle the things to prevent that.) This is actually a matter of keeping the battery management system in sync with the battery's actual state of charge, to get more run time before the device thinks the battery is almost dead.

Battery management isn't exactly trivial. It's a hell of a lot easier with a lead-acid battery, since the terminal voltage drops pretty linearly with the state of charge. That's a problem for electronics, since you need a much higher nominal voltage than you actually need and have to regulate it down, or must use a DC-DC converter to maintain a minimum level after the terminal voltage drops below what your equipment needs. Still, it's pretty straightforward to determine how much charge is left.

It's much more complicated with nickel-cadmium, nickel-metal-hydride or lithium-ion cells, since they do not have a linear discharge curve. Ni-Cads, for example, remain damn near flat until near the very end, where the voltage drops suddenly to a lower value for a while before going to zero. If you go beyond that "knee", you will likely damage cells (or in the case of a series pack, drive one or more cells into reverse ... bad news.) On the other hand, that flat discharge curve is great for electronic devices since your terminal voltage stays relatively constant. The problem comes in when trying to figure out how much juice you have left: you have to make an estimate of the amount of energy put in during charging, and how much taken out in operation.

Eventually, your estimate is going to be off. Batteries age and lose capacity, and errors in data acquisition occur. That's a real problem when charging: if you don't know when the pack is fully charged you're going to overcharge it and reduce its lifespan. Consequently, most commercial batteries have a thermistor or other temperature sensor in them which is monitored by battery management: when the battery has reached full charge, any additional charging current comes out as heat. The sudden rise in temperature indicates that the battery is charged.

Mac OS X has both launchd and cron.

The foundation invests the assets that it has not yet distributed, with the exclusive goal of maximizing the return on investment. As a result, its investments include companies that have been criticized for worsening poverty in the same developing countries where the Foundation is attempting to relieve poverty.[55] These include companies that pollute heavily and pharmaceutical companies that do not sell into the developing world.[56] In response to press criticism, the foundation announced in 2007 a review of its investments to assess social responsibility.[57] It subsequently cancelled the review and stood by its policy of investing for maximum return, while using voting rights to influence company practices.[58]

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-gatesx07jan07,0,6827615.story

The Gates Foundation has poured $218 million into polio and measles immunization and research worldwide, including in the Niger Delta. At the same time that the foundation is funding inoculations to protect health, The Times found, it has invested $423 million in Eni, Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon Mobil Corp., Chevron Corp. and Total of France — the companies responsible for most of the flares blanketing the delta with pollution, beyond anything permitted in the United States or Europe.

What good is curing Malaria for those people when in order to get there you help turn their environment into a complete mess? Also while Apple did certainly cut back on charity they didn't give it up completely and had with charities like Red.

http://www.apple.com/uk/ipod/red/

http://www.joinred.com/red/

The (RED) team would like to express condolences to Steve Jobs' family, friends and colleagues today. Mr. Jobs led Apple into its partnership with (RED) in 2006 and that partnership has helped to save the lives of millions of people with HIV in Africa. We are forever grateful for his leadership.

http://www.apple.com/batteries/iphone.html

"Use iPhone Regularly
For proper maintenance of a lithium-based battery, it’s important to keep the electrons in it moving occasionally. Be sure to go through at least one charge cycle per month (charging the battery to 100% and then completely running it down )."

"Use Your iPad Regularly
For proper reporting of the battery’s state of charge, be sure to go through at least one charge cycle per month (charging the battery to 100% and then completely running it down)."

http://www.apple.com/batteries/ right sidebar, bottom of the page.

HOWEVER - It does NOT say to do a full battery drain. It says to complete a full charge cycle at least once a month. It's just as valid to use 1/4 of the battery and recharge once a week. The only section that mentions a full discharge says that you shouldn't store devices fully discharged for extended periods of time - but on the flip side, it also says that you shouldn't leave it fully charged all the time either.

As I said before,

http://www.apple.com/batteries/notebooks.html

This is just an example. You SHOULD let the battery reach the end every once in a while. There are more devices that recommend this, and I doubt any company would be trying to ruin a battery that they actually replace for free if it goes under 80%

http://www.apple.com/batteries/notebooks.html

Damn, they want to ruin those batteries that are replaced for free if they go under 80% during the warranty period.

Many of the people protesting were using iPhones. You can buy the latest iPhone 4S (life-changing iOS 5 included) directly from the Apple Store right now.

Meet the Mac Mini

and have added more since launch.

trying to move the industry AWAY from an ancient interplay format and towards a more capable XML format

Bullshit!

Apple is building the foundation for the next generation of professional video editing; it's unsurprising some people cannot see that but in ten years you'll have some really outdated skills if you don't keep up with the state of the art.

Share to YouTube is not the foundation for the next generation of pro editing. Then there's the magnetic timeline... making the non-linear linear. And I'm sorry but skill in editing has nothing to do with what NLE you use!

You can buy a macbook pro with an "antiglare" screen.

And they're all being sued by Apple, who claim the use of the word "Pages" to describe the physical content of books infringes on one of their trademarks.

I'm not sure what exactly you mean by "future often-rumored Apple TV?".

http://www.apple.com/appletv/

Remote is a free, fun, and easy-to-use app that turns your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch into a remote control. So wherever you are in your house, you can control your computer’s iTunes library and your Apple TV with a tap or flick of a finger.

Watch the video. If it really works like it does in the video, we're talking about a whole new speech recognition experience. Once it's out, you can bet the Apple store will be filled with people putting it to the test.

Yeah, cause its never happened to anyone else before...

Last fall, Apple released their App Store Approval Guidelines. The relevant guideline—the only place where the word "duplicate" appears in the guidelines—is quoted on Stackoverflow:

Apps that duplicate apps already in the App Store may be rejected, particularly if there are many of them, such as fart, burp, flashlight, and Kama Sutra apps.

If you were to write and submit your own app that connected to Dropbox, it might get rejected. Given the number of third-party Facebook apps and Twitter clients still available on the App Store, however, I think that unlikely.

Plus there's no no shortage of web browsers on the App Store.

I feel pretty good about Dropbox never being pulled for "duplicating functionality."

Yeah, cause its never happened to anyone else before...

Last fall, Apple released their App Store Approval Guidelines. The relevant guideline—the only place where the word "duplicate" appears in the guidelines—is quoted on Stackoverflow:

Apps that duplicate apps already in the App Store may be rejected, particularly if there are many of them, such as fart, burp, flashlight, and Kama Sutra apps.

If you were to write and submit your own app that connected to Dropbox, it might get rejected. Given the number of third-party Facebook apps and Twitter clients still available on the App Store, however, I think that unlikely.

Plus there's no no shortage of web browsers on the App Store.

I feel pretty good about Dropbox never being pulled for "duplicating functionality."

Yeah, cause its never happened to anyone else before...

Last fall, Apple released their App Store Approval Guidelines. The relevant guideline—the only place where the word "duplicate" appears in the guidelines—is quoted on Stackoverflow:

Apps that duplicate apps already in the App Store may be rejected, particularly if there are many of them, such as fart, burp, flashlight, and Kama Sutra apps.

If you were to write and submit your own app that connected to Dropbox, it might get rejected. Given the number of third-party Facebook apps and Twitter clients still available on the App Store, however, I think that unlikely.

Plus there's no no shortage of web browsers on the App Store.

I feel pretty good about Dropbox never being pulled for "duplicating functionality."

Yeah, cause its never happened to anyone else before...

Last fall, Apple released their App Store Approval Guidelines. The relevant guideline—the only place where the word "duplicate" appears in the guidelines—is quoted on Stackoverflow:

Apps that duplicate apps already in the App Store may be rejected, particularly if there are many of them, such as fart, burp, flashlight, and Kama Sutra apps.

If you were to write and submit your own app that connected to Dropbox, it might get rejected. Given the number of third-party Facebook apps and Twitter clients still available on the App Store, however, I think that unlikely.

Plus there's no no shortage of web browsers on the App Store.

I feel pretty good about Dropbox never being pulled for "duplicating functionality."

Yeah, cause its never happened to anyone else before...

Last fall, Apple released their App Store Approval Guidelines. The relevant guideline—the only place where the word "duplicate" appears in the guidelines—is quoted on Stackoverflow:

Apps that duplicate apps already in the App Store may be rejected, particularly if there are many of them, such as fart, burp, flashlight, and Kama Sutra apps.

If you were to write and submit your own app that connected to Dropbox, it might get rejected. Given the number of third-party Facebook apps and Twitter clients still available on the App Store, however, I think that unlikely.

Plus there's no no shortage of web browsers on the App Store.

I feel pretty good about Dropbox never being pulled for "duplicating functionality."

Here-
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4942
2nd question down. I think you need iWork to do it (maybe?) Dang help piece is all over the place.
Don't you just love new stuff?

If you're truly interested, there's this list. It includes:
iCloud support.
Twitter integration.
OTA updates.
Wi-fi syncing.
Siri (iphone 4s only)
New notification interface & functionality.
Time/location-based reminders
MUCH better camera (init & picture-taking speed as well as image quality)
built in iMessage - essentially, 'free' iOS-to-iOS SMS/MMS messaging that won't count towards your phone plan's message limit.

There's really quite a bit of new stuff, it's worth reviewing the list if you're actually interested in seeing what's changed.

I'm still using Mac OS X 10.6, so no 10.7 update for me.

It sounded more like you updated to 10.7.2 and then went on some kind of deleting rampage removing iTunes and kernel extensions, etc.

Nah, I found the support article in the Google cache. So it's only one kernel extension you have to delete, and fewer reboots than I remember because I was thinking of this issue which I ran into once before which does require three reboots.

But at least I've learned not to trust Apple error messages when they tell you to reinstall iTunes instead of just admitting that it's their DRM servers that're preventing you from installing the update.

I'm still using Mac OS X 10.6, so no 10.7 update for me.

It sounded more like you updated to 10.7.2 and then went on some kind of deleting rampage removing iTunes and kernel extensions, etc.

Nah, I found the support article in the Google cache. So it's only one kernel extension you have to delete, and fewer reboots than I remember because I was thinking of this issue which I ran into once before which does require three reboots.

But at least I've learned not to trust Apple error messages when they tell you to reinstall iTunes instead of just admitting that it's their DRM servers that're preventing you from installing the update.

I get it to download, and extract the update. Btw, itunes 10.5 is required, so perhaps that's what it means. But in my case, it downloads and extracts the update. It then backs up my idevice (occurs with both ipad and iphone, running different versions of ios). It then tries to restore. It can't do that because an "internal error occurred." This is not a helpful error message. It links me here for "more information": http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1275. It looks useful, but so far no luck. Still haven't resolved it. At least one person on the forums is also experiencing it with my same OS version. (10.6.8) but Apple Discussions is being updated so I can't do a "me too" post. I didn't want to update my apps first, because I don't want all the updates, since some of them remove functionality. (Nook app, Kindle app), but I may have to. iOS 5 allows you to skip certain updates. That said, Apple's support is great. I'll go into the genius bar.

Installing/updating iTunes doesn't require a reboot. That part was entirely optional on your part. I expect you installed some other updates along with iTunes that requested that you reboot in order to finish the installation.

Oh, probably, I accidentally hit enter when Software Update popped up so I have no clue what the hell it installed. (There was a Safari update, at least, but that also shouldn't require a reboot.) So who knows why it required a reboot, but it did.

iTunes did bork on me after running the iTunes update. To fix this, go to: http://www.apple.com/itunes/

Download the latest iTunes and re-install it. It should fix any problems you were having with iTunes. At least, it fixed it for me.

The problem is that under Mac OS X, you have to delete a couple of kernel extensions to "really" reinstall iTunes. And the support site is down, so I have no idea what those are. But the end step is rerunning the iTunes installer, so we'll see if it works this time.

...Nope. Exact same (useless) error message telling me to update iTunes.

Nothing official yet:
http://www.apple.com/iphone/business/resources/

While reading the iOS5 features page (http://www.apple.com/ios/features.html), I went down to the "Mail" section and saw:

"Format text using bold, italic, or underlined fonts. Create indents in the text of your message."

Is that really something they should be advertising? Pretty advanced stuff..

But it just doesn't do it seamlessly. Besides the much lower batterylife on IOS devices with activesynch push, it doesn't seem to be reliable: http://support.apple.com/kb/ts1868

Android fanboys should get on their knees and thanks Jobs that he made the mass production of those devices possible.

Righty-O!

And here's about 4 dozen other reasons that F/OSS advocates should be kissing Jobs' cold, dead feet for...

You might want to check out Apple's opensource contributions, which include extensive work taking khtml and turning it into webkit - the same webkit that is used in Chrome.

Job also invited the KHTML people on-stage to thank them for their work, and when the KHTML project complained that the patch dumps they were receiving were not fine-grained enough to be usable to port back into KHTML, put the code in an svn repo for them. That's well beyond the requirements of the license.

As a business, Apple can't open everything and survive. That's the way it is, and people like RMS don't "get it". REad the comments here, particularly the one that begins

Richard Stallman is the L Ron Hubbard of the OSS community, unfortunately. The social and moral theory underneath The Manifesto is, to be polite, dubious at best. There is a reason that there are no open source plumbers, no open source sock mills, no open source dentists. Its an ideology that simultaneously lifts up and devalues software developers and other creative people. The idea that free software would create millions of jobs for local developers to support and modify local free apps was so wrong - at the time, and vastly more so in retrospect.
...
I would note that Stallman, safely ensconced in his ivory tower, feasting off of speaking engagements, need not worry about the mass exodus of development to wage slaves in 3rd world countries. Apparently his own "creativity" need not be given away for free.

There's both the room and the need for both closed and open source. Stallman is (literally) too stupid to realize this. Then again, he's shown time and again that he lacks maturity and can't learn from his mistakes, so why would anyone expect differently now?

As soon as I read this, I immediately recalled the safeguards in my cell phone and smiled.

I have an iPhone and I believe that one can set up Android phones to do this. I don't know about the cheaper, dumber cellular phones, but I don't plan to buy any:

Data protection is a feature available for iOS 4 devices that offer hardware encryption: iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, iPod touch (3rd generation or later), and all iPad models. Set up the passcode, require it immediately and then Enable Erase Data to automatically erase the device after ten failed passcode attempts.

This is from Apple's instruction on their website.

So, here's what happens. You're protesting Wall Street on the streets of California and you're picked up in a sweep. Or maybe you're not protesting—you're just picked up. When you are taken to booking, your personal effects are surrendered and itemized. The Police, thinking you are a druglord and interested in getting all of your contacts, go directly to your cell phone. But it asks for a passcode. And the newest iOS devices can ask for an alphanumeric passcode, which is even harder to guess than just a numerical sequence. You were smart, you didn't tell anyone your passcode, you "lawyered up," and you didn't make your birthday or anything obvious your passcode.

The police try various ideas six or seven times. They know that they get ten chances, so they decide to try to sweat it out of you. You give them two or three bogus passcodes before they figure you're scamming them. They've got one more chance and then data is erased. You smile and refuse to give out any more passwords, saying that you don't agree with the Supreme Court ruling and that you think that their repeated attempts to "break and enter" your phone constitute unreasonable search and seizure.

They try one more guess and the iPhone destroys all data on it. Or they don't touch your iPhone, figuring they may be able to find a judge who will compel you to reveal your passcode.

Turns out you are not a dangerous criminal, drug kingpin or international Man of Mystery—you're just a working stiff who was randomly picked up. You are let go and all of your personal effects are returned to you, including your cell phone.

You wait until you are far away from the police and you activate your phone and type in the correct passcode. Either the phone will work or it won't, based on whether or not the police tried ten different passcodes and initiated data erasure. It if was erased, you can restore the phone from it's backup on your computer (You do regularly back up the data on your phone, don't you?). If it wasn't, you can be secure that you have shared nothing with the police, beyond what you shared before you "lawyered up."

I would be very interested in confirmation that the Android devices have this same feature, but I suspect they do. I'm really sure that RIM's Blackberry cell phones may be locked down like this, as I do recall an article about our President's phone being secured by the Secret Service.

If you are a drug kingpin and you are a wrongdoer, then a pox on you and your family. This advice is directed to the other 99% of people who are good citizens.

When you restore your iDevice, that's exactly what you're doing, imaging. Apple has tools to help with mass deployment. I've seen screens... you build the image by checking off apps and permissions... its not all that much unlike PwnageTool, really. I wish I had GP's job... sounds like if you work it right, you have control over everything you need.

Perhaps it's just an experiment to see if it's even feasible.

Yes, given that Apple have built other prototype hardware in the past.

But I think it's quite feasible and quite desirable if it allows them to put something between the price of a tablet and full MacBook.

If Apple were to build such a machine, it might well just run straight iOS. iOS already supports hardware keyboards (at least via Bluetooth), and could conceivably support pointing devices other than the ones most people have on their hands (probably a trackpad if they build a machine that's not touchscreen-only; given the Magic Trackpad, Apple's interest in mice seems to be waning). It could well be that Mac OS X, complete with "go ahead and download a source tarball, compile it, and install it, if you want, or buy somebody's non-App Store software and install it", will remain as long as there are enough customers who want that type of OS (truck drivers, if you will, using Jobs' analogy) and iOS will be used for machines for customers for whom it's sufficient, even if those machines happen to look like notebook computers.

You should educate yourself on history. Steve Jobs complained about iTunes' inability to offer DRM free tracks back in February of 2007, with the first DRM-free tracks (from EMI) appearing in April of that year. It wasn't until January of 2008 that Amazon's MP3 store debuted with a DRM-free catalog. iTunes was hardly "following the leader".

Record industry executives openly admitted they were pitting Amazon's DRM-free offerings vs iTunes to see if they would end up pirated with any greater frequency than music from CD. They strung iTunes along for a year before allowing them to sell DRM-free tracks.

Don't you try to rewrite history.