In my university setting (chemistry and chemical engineering), about 40% of the computers in lecturers' and researchers' offices are Macs, the rest are PCs. I saw one SGI machine, but I think it was holding up a book case.
I assume you were hoping people would't actually follow them, and just put more stock in your comments because you have a link (a link to something that doesn't support your argument, but still).
What I meant by that is I have data for it, and there aren't any times of day where the data shows that the connection doesn't max out at 50mbit, either due to a file download, or 3 people watching iPlayer at the same time while someone else downloads etc.
I have Virgin cable, 50mbit/5mbit, but bundled with a budget cable TV package and a phone line (65+ channels, free weekend/evening calls) and it costs me $82/month.
It's been rock solid too - almost no downtime in the 2 years I've had it and no throttling or caps (although there was talk of them introducing throttling at peak times on all traffic, dropping my connection to 37.5mbit at those times, and in exchange for this they increased the upstream from 1mbit to 5mbit, but I think they have quietly dropped the throttling while leaving the upstream the same - I can't say I've ever noticed it happening regardless of when I use the net, so they are either doing it very transparently or they changed their mind about doing it to the 50mbit customers).
If anyone in the UK is considering cable internet and you can get Virgin in your area then I would highly recommend it (and no, I don't work for them or stand to gain anything from people taking it up).
My goodness, the hate is strong in this one. I think we need to simplify things to make it easier for you to understand through your frothing Apple hate.
1) I am aware that HFS and HFS+ are different things, albeit related.
2) Hard disks were not "in HFS+" in 1996 - it wasn't introduced until 1998 with OS 8.1.
3) HFS and HFS+ are not "locked in bullshit" they are open, documented specifications released under an open source licence. You have never needed to pay fees or royalties to use it.
4) As far as it being a "hack", it offered a few advantages compared to the alternatives around at the time (namely FAT), with some drawbacks also (several of these addressed by HFS+, some of them not).
5) Let's repeat number 3 again because it's quite important; there's nothing "locked in" about HFS or HFS+ - anyone can write tools to read and write the format, as a bunch of Unix-y folks did back in the mid 90s because despite your assertions that "no one cared" about it, people obviously had enough interest to warrant a utility to use the format on non-Apple OSes, along with at least two competing commercial products that clearly made enough money to be profitable (despite the existence of an open source tool that did the same job).
If you took off your "I hate Apple rarrr!" T shirt for long enough to maybe wash it occasionally, you might be able to have a debate using actual facts when you're not blinded by raw vitriol for a computer manufacturer.
You're contradicting yourself - you are claiming that HFS was "near dead" and are now claiming "HFS+ was never used on floppies", unless you're saying "no one cared about floppies because they were near dead [in 1998]" but that's a different issue. You were specifically talking about HFS.
Still, it remains accurate that you could use HFS formatted disks in non-Apple machines since 1996 due to the GPL licenced hfsutil. They certainly didn't have to pay any "licensing fee" to Apple for use of the format, which is what you claim prevented Microsoft from supporting the format in Windows.
We return full circle: you're talking out of your ass with wild, factually incorrect guesses and speculation.
Currently HFS and HFS+ are covered under Apple's open source licence, and the "near dead" HFS was supported fully (read, write, format) up until OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard and is now only legacy supported (read only) in OS X 10.7 Lion. Of course, hfsutil still works, and you're free to write your own HFS writing software.
HFS was replaced in 1998 by HFS+, but was supported by Apple up until earlier this year when OS X Lion was released - you can no longer format or write to HFS volumes in Lion, they are read only.
Not bad for a "damn near dead" proprietary format (that is part of Apple's open source offerings, along with HFS+)
hfsutils (open source) has been available since 1996 or so enabling the totally free, licence-fee-free use of HFS formatted disks on non-Apple systems to this day.
Don't let your Apple hate get in the way of facts or anything. You're looking for a "Apple are evil, that's why Windows didn't support HFS!" angle where it really doesn't exist.
Right, that's well known, but we're talking about handset makers who make handset X and then ship it with Android on. Apple does not distribute iOS *at all* to external vendors, so it doesn't "forbid" handset makers installing it on non-Apple hardware, they simply do not have access to iOS to be able to do so in the first place.
In the case of OS X, the point is valid - they went after third party hackintosh vendors who were shipping machines with OS X preinstalled commercially, but so far have done little to stop the hobbyist (the OS X install DVD (older OS X)/Lion disk image is absurdly easy to use - no serials, no encryption, no hardware checks, no DRM, no activation - they really don;t care about it on the hobby scale, only if you start selling machines).
What exactly does Apple forbid? Who else makes iPhones that would be "forbidden" from shipping them with a different OS? I don't think that's quite the point to make.
The original point was that IE was free and bundled, and they were strong arming OEMs into not selling computers with competing browsers or OSes using the cost of Windows licences as the stick.
But the story says "all 2010 MBPs", so even if 20 slash dotters post here that their 2010 MBPs are working, the story has been proven BS, not that slashdot owns 100% of all 2010 MBPs, which no one is suggesting at all.
To be fair you are quoting an article written about this issue from someone with some bias.
"Apple knew about the issue" [citation needed]
"hasn't responded to the issue" [demonstrably false - they are asking for feedback and crash logs].
The fact that people are screaming "boycott" in a technical forum is.... human nature. I saw it *all the time* in Blizzard's forums - especially back in the day when they had weekly server restarts and fortnightly maintenance that would take the servers down for a few hours, and even with update posts on restart times if they didn't come back up the *second* the estimate time was reached (along with the constant posts during the downtime) there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth.
I have seen it in the PSN forums (I used to moderate them as a job in college many years ago), on the BBC iPlayer forums.. pretty much anywhere there is a place for people to vent, they will do so, and they'll all talk about how "unacceptable" it all is and how "I am boycotting!". Hell, we see it on slashdot every time video games get mentioned - a flurry of posts about boycotts due to DRM/removal of LAN play/TF2 hats etc.
Now, I'm sure there are problems but I find it hard to believe there wasn't extensive testing on all manner of hardware to try to iron out bugs. It's also why there was a dev release to help catch things like this that might not show on generic systems. I think people are expecting Apple to go "oh, silly us! we forgot to close a bracket in the driver code! All fixed!" and the fact that it hasn't been instantly cured is taken as a sign that they don't care. It's obviously quite a specific bug, since it doesn't affect all models of the same generation, but does seem to be limited to a specific model type .
You can't ensure 100% perfect products in a mass production line (at least, not economically), so the speed, efficiency and cost of putting right a lemon is an important part of any business that sells consumer products.
If they do it right, then they should be praised. Far too much emphasis has been placed on companies to not only repair a product but to then be expected to bend over and ass kiss the entitlement attitude customer who says "ok, so you fixed that for free so I now have what I purchased, but what are you going to do for me?"
He's not claiming everyone is like that, just that many are. Based on the comments already in this thread, he is pretty accurate.
I had the original Halo (on OS X) and enjoyed it a lot, so I picked up Halo 2 when it was on sale (but still a Vista exclusive "games for windows" nonsense thing) and installed it via dual booting.
Big mistake - it was one of the crappiest ports I think I've ever seen. Not only were all the menus and prompts still marked with Xbox buttons, the mouse controls in the menus did a pretty good job of imitating what it must feel like to be actively having a stroke. It seemed like the actual activation points for the buttons were in random places, so clicking the mouse on a button wouldn't work. Generally if you clicked quite a way below and to the side it would activate that button, which made it a pain to navigate in dense menus.
The game itself was not too bad in the control sense, but the level of cheesing was just outrageous - auto aim, regenerating health, bugs with weapons etc. It was a shadow of the first game (which was still only a 'quite good' shooter).
Still, the biggest single injustice was the nerfing of the pistol. Such a great weapon, sadly reduced to uselessness.
Given that his "statistical evidence" is the top 10 bestselling phones on Amazon in the USA only, and what we're talking about is my experience of the UK market, then "yes", in this case. He's attempting to refute my anecdotal experiences with data from a market that has nothing to do with what I'm talking about. Apparently the "HTC Droid Incredible 2 on Verizon" is the top selling phone! I wonder why I haven;t seen any of those in my day to day life? Could it be that Verizon is a USA-exclusive carrier, and that phone is not available here on any carrier? Nah! He cited evidence! It must just be my faulty experiences!
I already linked to an article that breaks down iOS/Blackberry/Android marketshares in the UK (and europe as a whole) - Android is 12% here, mostly due to cheap Android phones that are available on considerably cheaper contracts than iPhones (and until recently, Blackberries, but since they have been in steady decline facing the rise of Android, there are now some very cheap BB deals).
I also posted that, after searching, the current best selling phone in the UK this week is the HTC Desire - likely because it is almost as good as an iPhone for many people and you can get it on a cheap contract.
You're getting very defensive - "your opinion doesn't mean squat", "bring it on" - I'm not personally attacking Android here, I am offering my experiences. That list is for US sales - perhaps it is different in the UK? (I just looked on Amazon's UK site, and they don't seem to have an equivalent UK list for mobile phones). The majority of phones here are purchased in high street stores, which may suggest the reason for the differences.
In fact, I would wager it's exactly that issue:
http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/38347/ios-massively-outshines-android-europe (Feb 2011 data) - android is growng in the UK (12% market share compared to iOS at 42%), but it's the cheaper handsets I'm seeing, although another search shows that of the top ten best selling phones in the UK as of this month, the HTC Desire is number 1, so perhaps we are just delayed in getting decent handsets? The iPhone and Blackberry are still king here - it seems if you don't want an iPhone but are still willing to spend you get a BB instead of an Android, but perhaps that will change (BB has been declining since November).
I have no cite, only my personal experience. Perhaps I just know some very cheap people but I have only run into two people with awesome Android phones, and about 10 or 15 people with really poor ones. Three of those have said they hate it and will be switching to a new phone as soon as possible. One of those has and got an iPhone 4, the other two are still in contract and are considering more expensive Android phones since they like the OS.
I always ask to try out friends' phones if the opportunity arises for these very discussions, so I can get a feel for exactly what is going on (I can hardly be critical of something in detail that I have not personally tried, nor can I see the shortcomings of my own phone if I don't see what else is available).
The cheap Android phones seem to be outselling their expensive cousins because of that reason: people want a smartphone since they have seen this whole "iPhone thing" and then balk at the price, then see what look to be equivalent smartphones for much less, only to be disappointed. They are not the sort of people looking at the really nice android phones that match the iPhone. Those who buy those tend to be the very specific clued in consumer who has decided that what the iPhone offers is not for them.
It's one or the other - if you want to claim they have the polish *and* and marketshare, then you are dreaming.
There are some really awesome Android handsets that are more than a match for the iPhone. These don't make up the majority of the Android market share though - that distinction belongs to the cheaper "built to a budget" phones that can also run Android. I've seen several of these handsets too (and used them) and they are nowhere near the polish of an iPhone (or their much better Android cousins).
So, it is more accurate to say "Android has swelled its marketshare by going after part of the market that Apple has no interest in - cheap, crappy smartphones - while also having some genuine iPhone equivalents". You can't simply say that have "overtaken iPhones in marketshare and polish".
There are some features of Android that I'd love to have on iOS, and funnily enough, they weren't features that the cheap Android phones I've used have had on them either. Other than that, by far the biggest downer on the cheap ones is the quality of the screen and the quality of the touch response.
Of course manufacturers can make something equivalent to the iPad 2 "within a year" - they just can't make it cheaper than Apple, which has been the rub. Everyone automatically assumed that Apple was slapping a giant markup on the iPad and making hay while the sun shined. The number of "just you wait for the Android tablets at half the price with better features! any day now! any day! next month!" posts that we saw on slashdot and other sites during the iPad 1's unchallenged reign was remarkable. The closest we really got was the Xoom, which, funnily enough, cost pretty much the same as the iPad. What they were hoping for was to be able to get some sales going because the Xoom was better than the iPad 1, but Apple went ahead and one-upped them and released the iPad 2 at the same time and for the same price as the first one and the Xoom is dead in the water. It didn;t help that they rushed it to market too quickly because of the impending iPad 2 and shipped it with some of the much lauded "essential missing features" of the iPad not working at all (SD reader, Flash, usb).
I have lived in the US and in the UK (I'm British), along with three other relatives who have lived in both countries over a 30 year period. From our combined experiences, the quality of care is no different, it just costs vastly, vastly more in the USA.
The propaganda machines have done an excellent job in painting single payer healthcare systems in other countries as some form of "backwater chop shops" and the American public has lapped it up. The reality is far different, but there is a lot of power and money in controlling access to healthcare in the US, so of course the insurance companies and lobbyists are going to try and keep it that way.
Some of the talking points parroted by the public during the healthcare debates were just farcical, with the hilarious story that "Stephen Hawking wouldn't have stood a chance under the British healthcare system" story that managed to make it past basic google searches for "Stephen Hawking" (he is British, born in Britain, and 'owes his life to the NHS' (direct quote from him)), not even being the most outlandish example.
It is also *extremely* morally bankrupt to talk about "the quality of care is great for those who can pay for it" as an example of an acceptable system, when a vast number of US citizens simply have no access at all, beyond going to the ER when they finally reach the point of either dying or going to a doctor. That is no way to run a civilised country. The US healthcare system is one of the biggest embarrassments of the US, yet time after time there are hordes of people who are paid handsomely to sell the polished turd to the American people. They're very good at it.
To be fair on the healthcare issue, that is *only* a problem for American business. Here in the rest of the world, we all have vastly more efficient and cheaper national health systems (or hybrid private/national systems) that much reduce the "cost" of a worker due to healthcare provision.
And, just to head off the inevitable "it's not free!" arguments; of course not. It is paid for by taxes, but it is considerably more cost effective for everyone concerned (workers, businesses, the country as a whole).
Slashdot Mirror
Nice troll attempt.
In my university setting (chemistry and chemical engineering), about 40% of the computers in lecturers' and researchers' offices are Macs, the rest are PCs. I saw one SGI machine, but I think it was holding up a book case.
Amusing that your own links contradict you.
I assume you were hoping people would't actually follow them, and just put more stock in your comments because you have a link (a link to something that doesn't support your argument, but still).
What I meant by that is I have data for it, and there aren't any times of day where the data shows that the connection doesn't max out at 50mbit, either due to a file download, or 3 people watching iPlayer at the same time while someone else downloads etc.
We seem to get 50mbit/5mbit at all times of day.
I have Virgin cable, 50mbit/5mbit, but bundled with a budget cable TV package and a phone line (65+ channels, free weekend/evening calls) and it costs me $82/month.
It's been rock solid too - almost no downtime in the 2 years I've had it and no throttling or caps (although there was talk of them introducing throttling at peak times on all traffic, dropping my connection to 37.5mbit at those times, and in exchange for this they increased the upstream from 1mbit to 5mbit, but I think they have quietly dropped the throttling while leaving the upstream the same - I can't say I've ever noticed it happening regardless of when I use the net, so they are either doing it very transparently or they changed their mind about doing it to the 50mbit customers).
If anyone in the UK is considering cable internet and you can get Virgin in your area then I would highly recommend it (and no, I don't work for them or stand to gain anything from people taking it up).
My goodness, the hate is strong in this one. I think we need to simplify things to make it easier for you to understand through your frothing Apple hate.
1) I am aware that HFS and HFS+ are different things, albeit related.
2) Hard disks were not "in HFS+" in 1996 - it wasn't introduced until 1998 with OS 8.1.
3) HFS and HFS+ are not "locked in bullshit" they are open, documented specifications released under an open source licence. You have never needed to pay fees or royalties to use it.
4) As far as it being a "hack", it offered a few advantages compared to the alternatives around at the time (namely FAT), with some drawbacks also (several of these addressed by HFS+, some of them not).
5) Let's repeat number 3 again because it's quite important; there's nothing "locked in" about HFS or HFS+ - anyone can write tools to read and write the format, as a bunch of Unix-y folks did back in the mid 90s because despite your assertions that "no one cared" about it, people obviously had enough interest to warrant a utility to use the format on non-Apple OSes, along with at least two competing commercial products that clearly made enough money to be profitable (despite the existence of an open source tool that did the same job).
If you took off your "I hate Apple rarrr!" T shirt for long enough to maybe wash it occasionally, you might be able to have a debate using actual facts when you're not blinded by raw vitriol for a computer manufacturer.
You're contradicting yourself - you are claiming that HFS was "near dead" and are now claiming "HFS+ was never used on floppies", unless you're saying "no one cared about floppies because they were near dead [in 1998]" but that's a different issue. You were specifically talking about HFS.
Still, it remains accurate that you could use HFS formatted disks in non-Apple machines since 1996 due to the GPL licenced hfsutil. They certainly didn't have to pay any "licensing fee" to Apple for use of the format, which is what you claim prevented Microsoft from supporting the format in Windows.
We return full circle: you're talking out of your ass with wild, factually incorrect guesses and speculation.
Currently HFS and HFS+ are covered under Apple's open source licence, and the "near dead" HFS was supported fully (read, write, format) up until OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard and is now only legacy supported (read only) in OS X 10.7 Lion. Of course, hfsutil still works, and you're free to write your own HFS writing software.
HFS was replaced in 1998 by HFS+, but was supported by Apple up until earlier this year when OS X Lion was released - you can no longer format or write to HFS volumes in Lion, they are read only.
Not bad for a "damn near dead" proprietary format (that is part of Apple's open source offerings, along with HFS+)
hfsutils (open source) has been available since 1996 or so enabling the totally free, licence-fee-free use of HFS formatted disks on non-Apple systems to this day.
Don't let your Apple hate get in the way of facts or anything. You're looking for a "Apple are evil, that's why Windows didn't support HFS!" angle where it really doesn't exist.
Right, that's well known, but we're talking about handset makers who make handset X and then ship it with Android on. Apple does not distribute iOS *at all* to external vendors, so it doesn't "forbid" handset makers installing it on non-Apple hardware, they simply do not have access to iOS to be able to do so in the first place.
In the case of OS X, the point is valid - they went after third party hackintosh vendors who were shipping machines with OS X preinstalled commercially, but so far have done little to stop the hobbyist (the OS X install DVD (older OS X)/Lion disk image is absurdly easy to use - no serials, no encryption, no hardware checks, no DRM, no activation - they really don;t care about it on the hobby scale, only if you start selling machines).
What exactly does Apple forbid? Who else makes iPhones that would be "forbidden" from shipping them with a different OS? I don't think that's quite the point to make.
The original point was that IE was free and bundled, and they were strong arming OEMs into not selling computers with competing browsers or OSes using the cost of Windows licences as the stick.
But the story says "all 2010 MBPs", so even if 20 slash dotters post here that their 2010 MBPs are working, the story has been proven BS, not that slashdot owns 100% of all 2010 MBPs, which no one is suggesting at all.
Nice try, though. 4/10 for effort.
To be fair you are quoting an article written about this issue from someone with some bias.
"Apple knew about the issue" [citation needed]
"hasn't responded to the issue" [demonstrably false - they are asking for feedback and crash logs].
The fact that people are screaming "boycott" in a technical forum is.... human nature. I saw it *all the time* in Blizzard's forums - especially back in the day when they had weekly server restarts and fortnightly maintenance that would take the servers down for a few hours, and even with update posts on restart times if they didn't come back up the *second* the estimate time was reached (along with the constant posts during the downtime) there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth.
I have seen it in the PSN forums (I used to moderate them as a job in college many years ago), on the BBC iPlayer forums.. pretty much anywhere there is a place for people to vent, they will do so, and they'll all talk about how "unacceptable" it all is and how "I am boycotting!". Hell, we see it on slashdot every time video games get mentioned - a flurry of posts about boycotts due to DRM/removal of LAN play/TF2 hats etc.
Now, I'm sure there are problems but I find it hard to believe there wasn't extensive testing on all manner of hardware to try to iron out bugs. It's also why there was a dev release to help catch things like this that might not show on generic systems. I think people are expecting Apple to go "oh, silly us! we forgot to close a bracket in the driver code! All fixed!" and the fact that it hasn't been instantly cured is taken as a sign that they don't care. It's obviously quite a specific bug, since it doesn't affect all models of the same generation, but does seem to be limited to a specific model type .
Yes, why not?
You can't ensure 100% perfect products in a mass production line (at least, not economically), so the speed, efficiency and cost of putting right a lemon is an important part of any business that sells consumer products.
If they do it right, then they should be praised. Far too much emphasis has been placed on companies to not only repair a product but to then be expected to bend over and ass kiss the entitlement attitude customer who says "ok, so you fixed that for free so I now have what I purchased, but what are you going to do for me?"
Reading the summary is hard.
90% of homes in which country?
I'm not sure where you live, but my night time electricity is *considerably* cheaper than my day rate.
Halo 2 made it obvious - "press [image of red Xbox controller button] for back", on the PC version.
He's not claiming everyone is like that, just that many are. Based on the comments already in this thread, he is pretty accurate.
I had the original Halo (on OS X) and enjoyed it a lot, so I picked up Halo 2 when it was on sale (but still a Vista exclusive "games for windows" nonsense thing) and installed it via dual booting.
Big mistake - it was one of the crappiest ports I think I've ever seen. Not only were all the menus and prompts still marked with Xbox buttons, the mouse controls in the menus did a pretty good job of imitating what it must feel like to be actively having a stroke. It seemed like the actual activation points for the buttons were in random places, so clicking the mouse on a button wouldn't work. Generally if you clicked quite a way below and to the side it would activate that button, which made it a pain to navigate in dense menus.
The game itself was not too bad in the control sense, but the level of cheesing was just outrageous - auto aim, regenerating health, bugs with weapons etc. It was a shadow of the first game (which was still only a 'quite good' shooter).
Still, the biggest single injustice was the nerfing of the pistol. Such a great weapon, sadly reduced to uselessness.
Given that his "statistical evidence" is the top 10 bestselling phones on Amazon in the USA only, and what we're talking about is my experience of the UK market, then "yes", in this case. He's attempting to refute my anecdotal experiences with data from a market that has nothing to do with what I'm talking about. Apparently the "HTC Droid Incredible 2 on Verizon" is the top selling phone! I wonder why I haven;t seen any of those in my day to day life? Could it be that Verizon is a USA-exclusive carrier, and that phone is not available here on any carrier? Nah! He cited evidence! It must just be my faulty experiences!
I already linked to an article that breaks down iOS/Blackberry/Android marketshares in the UK (and europe as a whole) - Android is 12% here, mostly due to cheap Android phones that are available on considerably cheaper contracts than iPhones (and until recently, Blackberries, but since they have been in steady decline facing the rise of Android, there are now some very cheap BB deals).
I also posted that, after searching, the current best selling phone in the UK this week is the HTC Desire - likely because it is almost as good as an iPhone for many people and you can get it on a cheap contract.
Well, if you don't want to tinker, then the iPad is better choice because it's cheaper than a Xoom.
You're getting very defensive - "your opinion doesn't mean squat", "bring it on" - I'm not personally attacking Android here, I am offering my experiences. That list is for US sales - perhaps it is different in the UK? (I just looked on Amazon's UK site, and they don't seem to have an equivalent UK list for mobile phones). The majority of phones here are purchased in high street stores, which may suggest the reason for the differences.
In fact, I would wager it's exactly that issue:
http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/38347/ios-massively-outshines-android-europe (Feb 2011 data) - android is growng in the UK (12% market share compared to iOS at 42%), but it's the cheaper handsets I'm seeing, although another search shows that of the top ten best selling phones in the UK as of this month, the HTC Desire is number 1, so perhaps we are just delayed in getting decent handsets? The iPhone and Blackberry are still king here - it seems if you don't want an iPhone but are still willing to spend you get a BB instead of an Android, but perhaps that will change (BB has been declining since November).
So who's buying them, or is that list skewed by people who buy phones online, and not via a carrier store?
My personal experience of seeing actual phones in the wild is the opposite. I think I've seen one Incredible.
I have no cite, only my personal experience. Perhaps I just know some very cheap people but I have only run into two people with awesome Android phones, and about 10 or 15 people with really poor ones. Three of those have said they hate it and will be switching to a new phone as soon as possible. One of those has and got an iPhone 4, the other two are still in contract and are considering more expensive Android phones since they like the OS.
I always ask to try out friends' phones if the opportunity arises for these very discussions, so I can get a feel for exactly what is going on (I can hardly be critical of something in detail that I have not personally tried, nor can I see the shortcomings of my own phone if I don't see what else is available).
The cheap Android phones seem to be outselling their expensive cousins because of that reason: people want a smartphone since they have seen this whole "iPhone thing" and then balk at the price, then see what look to be equivalent smartphones for much less, only to be disappointed. They are not the sort of people looking at the really nice android phones that match the iPhone. Those who buy those tend to be the very specific clued in consumer who has decided that what the iPhone offers is not for them.
add the touchscreen layer
You just answered your own question.
It's one or the other - if you want to claim they have the polish *and* and marketshare, then you are dreaming.
There are some really awesome Android handsets that are more than a match for the iPhone. These don't make up the majority of the Android market share though - that distinction belongs to the cheaper "built to a budget" phones that can also run Android. I've seen several of these handsets too (and used them) and they are nowhere near the polish of an iPhone (or their much better Android cousins).
So, it is more accurate to say "Android has swelled its marketshare by going after part of the market that Apple has no interest in - cheap, crappy smartphones - while also having some genuine iPhone equivalents". You can't simply say that have "overtaken iPhones in marketshare and polish".
There are some features of Android that I'd love to have on iOS, and funnily enough, they weren't features that the cheap Android phones I've used have had on them either. Other than that, by far the biggest downer on the cheap ones is the quality of the screen and the quality of the touch response.
Of course manufacturers can make something equivalent to the iPad 2 "within a year" - they just can't make it cheaper than Apple, which has been the rub. Everyone automatically assumed that Apple was slapping a giant markup on the iPad and making hay while the sun shined. The number of "just you wait for the Android tablets at half the price with better features! any day now! any day! next month!" posts that we saw on slashdot and other sites during the iPad 1's unchallenged reign was remarkable. The closest we really got was the Xoom, which, funnily enough, cost pretty much the same as the iPad. What they were hoping for was to be able to get some sales going because the Xoom was better than the iPad 1, but Apple went ahead and one-upped them and released the iPad 2 at the same time and for the same price as the first one and the Xoom is dead in the water. It didn;t help that they rushed it to market too quickly because of the impending iPad 2 and shipped it with some of the much lauded "essential missing features" of the iPad not working at all (SD reader, Flash, usb).
"All evidence" points to that? Really?
I have lived in the US and in the UK (I'm British), along with three other relatives who have lived in both countries over a 30 year period. From our combined experiences, the quality of care is no different, it just costs vastly, vastly more in the USA.
The propaganda machines have done an excellent job in painting single payer healthcare systems in other countries as some form of "backwater chop shops" and the American public has lapped it up. The reality is far different, but there is a lot of power and money in controlling access to healthcare in the US, so of course the insurance companies and lobbyists are going to try and keep it that way.
Some of the talking points parroted by the public during the healthcare debates were just farcical, with the hilarious story that "Stephen Hawking wouldn't have stood a chance under the British healthcare system" story that managed to make it past basic google searches for "Stephen Hawking" (he is British, born in Britain, and 'owes his life to the NHS' (direct quote from him)), not even being the most outlandish example.
It is also *extremely* morally bankrupt to talk about "the quality of care is great for those who can pay for it" as an example of an acceptable system, when a vast number of US citizens simply have no access at all, beyond going to the ER when they finally reach the point of either dying or going to a doctor. That is no way to run a civilised country. The US healthcare system is one of the biggest embarrassments of the US, yet time after time there are hordes of people who are paid handsomely to sell the polished turd to the American people. They're very good at it.
To be fair on the healthcare issue, that is *only* a problem for American business. Here in the rest of the world, we all have vastly more efficient and cheaper national health systems (or hybrid private/national systems) that much reduce the "cost" of a worker due to healthcare provision.
And, just to head off the inevitable "it's not free!" arguments; of course not. It is paid for by taxes, but it is considerably more cost effective for everyone concerned (workers, businesses, the country as a whole).