LG won design awards for the Prada in 2006. The iPhone came out in 2007.
Source?
You don't need a prior patent to invalidate another patent, you only need prior art. It only needs to be demonstrated that LG designed their phone first, not patented the design.
Then LG would have to come out and make that prior art claim, which strangely enough they haven't, at least not legally...
Seriously, Apple have been abusing patent law for their gain for a while now. You can claim patent law is broken (which it is), and you can claim that their patents are legally valid (which at least some of them are, others are questionable), and you can claim all their competitors are doing the same (which they are, some less aggressively though). However, claiming Apple are being honest and not engaging in anti-competitive patent hoarding and suing is flat out false. Yes, lots of other companies do the same, some are worse, some are better.
Everyone in this industry abuses patent law, but they are even worse than Apple because instead of actually going to court and having the validity of their patents disputed, they engage in legal threats with smaller players with intent to extort! Apple isn't doing that, they're going after the big players and they're putting their patents to the test! Is it a bad thing? It is, but that's what patent law enables you to do, so as I mentioned before, don't blame the players, blame the game. Everybody plays that game, you're just not aware of it because they don't usually make it public! Apple isn't interested in money, they're just happy to do their thing, and in this case a bunch of other companies saw their success and started to copy them, which to me is a perfectly legitimate reason to bring them to court.
Yeah, it took them whole month after iPhone to get a similar design out.
Can you please tell me exactly what that is supposed to prove? Announcing a product with a similar design is something they could have done even a day following Apple's announcements. It's not like they have to have an actual product for the announcement... Fact is that the phone you link to came out nearly a year after the iPhone, from which it borrows features (along with the BlackBerry, another powerful brand at the time). If anything, this proves that Samsung is all about freeloading on the competition's innovations.
It was completely unobvious for a touchscreen-centric device. Also, this is not a smartphone, and slide-out keyboard makes it _completely_ different. They couldn't ever think about stripping off that keyboard, right?
After Apple showed the world how to make touch-friendly UIs, yes, it became obvious that touchscreen phones didn't need physical keyboards...
By the way, this design was registered in Korea before first iPhone pictures.
Touchscreen phones existed long before the iPhone, they were just not successful or practical because they lacked a proper firmware. It wasn't until Apple released the iPhone and showed the world how to design a proper touchscreen phone complete with a touch-friendly user interface that the designs gained popularity and everybody started to blatantly copy them. By focusing on individual patents rather than the whole argument you are missing this point entirely, so no wonder these legal battles don't make sense to you.
We're speaking about _design_ patents. You can claim the existence of prior art for a design patent as long as there was actual implementation of such design.
Smartphone design patterns! The domain is relevant!
You see no relation whatsoever to Apple's product bearing a remarkable (and I'm sure Apple will claim, harmless) resemblance to an earlier LG product and Samsung's product bearing a resemblance to Apples (Which Samsung claims is harmless)?
No, because it would be unfeasible for Apple to copy LG in such a short amount of time, not to mention that the Prada never received a lot of attention thus making it even less reasonable for Apple to copy it specifically. Samsung, in the other hand, changed the design of their phones radically after the iPhone (which received a lot of attention) came out, and now there's even evidence that they were warned about the similarities and continued not to care, so they were aware and we are in the presence of bad faith.
You can see no reason at all that might weaken Apples claims in the slightest?
The iPhone was patented before it was launched. Unless you can demonstrate that LG patented that design first, then no, I do not see how that would be of relevance.
And, I will note that a game only exists if there are players. If I hate the game, I fully reserve the right to hate the player for keeping it alive.
The players can't survive unless they play the game, so hating them doesn't make that much sense. Everybody in this industry patents stuff and makes legal threats in hopes to extort smaller players through settlements, so in my opinion I think it's pretty good to actually see a company that came from the brink of bankruptcy be so open about their business practices and actually engage into patent wars against the once threatening big players that it now dwarves. You are not hating Apple because of how they do business, you are hating Apple because unlike others they are open about it, you are hating Apple because they're honest.
The sdesigns we are seeing ALL reflect images of future technology dating back to the 1960s. None of them have the right to lay claim on the design as far as I can see. The only reason we didn't see these designs in products in the '60s is that we had to wait for the general state of technology to catch up with the vision.
You can't claim the existence of prior art without an actual implementation, nor can you patent something that is currently not feasible to implement.
The "safe" money is on doing the same thing over again. This includes porting Angry Birds to a new platform versus trying something new and interesting that could also fail to find a market.
Doing the same thing over and over again equates to reselling on the same platform. EA can afford to port because they're huge, but their falling market cap won't allow them to tank forever. They had a spike in 2011 resulting from the Star Wars: The Old Republic hype (a PC-exclusive title), but once that was revealed to not be a worthy competitor to World of Warcraft their shares returned to their falling tendency.
Different skills are required for porting vs. creating something new. Because different personnel tend to have different skills, it becomes easier to have one team do the ports, have another team creating something new, and do that in parallel. That's how the fighting game market worked back in the early 1990s: one team would make an arcade game, and another team would port it to Super NES and Sega Genesis while the first team would make the next arcade game. Or what am I missing?
Actually, "ports" only started to happen when the Saturn and the PlayStation came out, and since SEGA was a hardware vendor they could pretty much make it feasible to actually port stuff from the arcade without requiring a huge investment. This, however, was not the case for Nintendo or the PC, which were totally different platforms with totally different games, even if in some cases those games shared similar names you can think of them as completely new products since they were always complete rewrites. After the Saturn and the PlayStation (which still had a lot of exclusive games), you started to see some ports, but it wasn't until Microsoft entered the game (not pun intended) and made it easier to port stuff from/to the PC, that ports became common, and even then many developers still tried the best they could to distance themselves from the PS3 initially.
Meaning that we must conclude either that the iPhone is a copy of the Prada OR we must conceed tha tsimiolar goals and same technology lead to naturally similar designs.
I don't see how the former could be feasible considering the timeframe. Regarding the latter, don't blame the players, blame the game.
Either way, Apple is left with no justification of their lawsuits or theie yelling "Mine Mine Mine!" Daffy Duck like.
They aren't suing LG as far as I know, so I don't see the relation, and there's strong evidence pointing to Samsung having actually and knowingly copied Apple's designs. Plus as I mention what matters are the dates in which patents are filed, not the time products come out. Once you file an application for a patent you can pretty much assume that it's public knowledge.
I'm neither playing victim nor trying to bring attention to anything. As a matter of fact the only person complaining about others here is you. In your own words, welcome to reality, where fairness is nothing more than an ideal and the people who have the means, do, while those that don't, complain. I see no point in your complaint about others, especially since you acknowledge that the world is unfair. Are you against trying to make it fairer? Are you against the expression of opinions? Are you against fairness? Are you a fanboy? Because honestly I see no other logical reasons for your stance!
Accomplishing shit is easier when have an advantage. Try starting a company with no money to begin with and no stable family to fall back to if you fail..
The Prada came out only 4 months before the iPhone, furthermore that tells you nothing about previous research or patent applications. If Apple had iPad prototypes as early as 2004, imagine when they started to think about and patent iPhone designs, especially considering that the first iPhone concept is from 1983 (totally different from what it is now, but serves to show just how long Apple has been thinking about the iPhone)...
So angry birds shouldn't of bothered with the port.
We'll never know about the projects they could have spent the same resources developing... What I said is that given the choice between porting and creating something new, it's dumb to port. Did Rovio had the choice to create something new? I don't know, so I can not answer your question.
You're doing it wrong. The business logic for your app should be written in a platform agnostic way, and will be trivial to port. The difference between building our app for iOS or Android is which ant task to run.
And who ports the abstraction layer that provides the platform-agnosticism? Here you have someone who actually does that questioning the merits of a specific platform, so if you can't convince these people to do the heavy lifting for you, how can you keep yourself platform-agnostic? Specifying and maintaining a proper abstraction layer takes an awful lot of time, and that's what this is all about.
Believe me or not, i don't care. Maybe i should of said 2-12 weeks depending on complexity, but in the end 12 grand is worth it even if was only ever pirated (doubtful), the exposer alone makes it better than advertising.
It's not worth it when you can spend the same amount of time developing something new for the actually profitable platform. You are wrong in every possible aspect, you demonstrate lack of experience, and your grammar sucks. Your claims of intelligence or competence are very hard to believe at this point.
I pity them if what goes on in their mind fits into 140 characters. Oh, wait - it often doesn't. That's why people have invented all those shortcuts and tricks. Instead of, you know, simply lifting a completely bullshit character limitation.
That's a feature, not a limitation. People are less likely to care about what you post if you post an essay than if you post a teasing headline with a link to an essay.
Not everyone who is different from the mainstream is dumber.
I don't use social networks either, including Twitter, but that hasn't stopped me from understanding their purpose and appeal.
And your answer is why Apple will never find themselves in the position currently enjoyed by Microsoft. By constantly pandering to the dumbest common denominator, they ensure that anybody with a brain and an ounce of self-respect (not to mention financial acumen) won't buy their products. Perhaps this will be a good thing for Linux in the end, as Microsoft sh*ts all over its heritage, and Apple steadfastly refuses to improve its products (all the while adding more shiny to compensate), people are forced to consider the alternatives.
Tthat must be why both the OS X market share and Mac sales are increasing in a stagnant PC market as well as why Microsoft is slowly phasing out their graphical user interface on the Windows 8 Server...
But it is not irrational to believe that the established belief is incorrect. The mere fact of widespread acceptance of a belief is not evidence of it's validity.
Actually there is no rationality in beliefs. They are not facts and do not constitute evidence of any kind. It is OK to believe. What is not OK is to tell others that their beliefs are wrong without presenting actual evidence to support that claim, because without evidence it doesn't make sense for you to consider your belief any more valid than other people's.
In fact, this was the basis of the American technological lead during and after the Industrial Revolution. It's practically a mantra in business. "There is always a better way do do something." The successful corporations are the one's that find the new and better ways and adopt them.
That's speculation and has no place in logical debates. As a counter to your speculation I could also claim that successful companies are those that undermine their competitors the most, usually from a position of advantage. How would you refute my belief without actual evidence? And why should I give any more credence to your belief than to mine? This is where burden of proof enters the game -- in this context I would have burden of proof since I would be the one making charges (i.e.: I would be the one claiming that your belief is wrong).
When I was much younger I assumed (for a while) that if everybody believed it, that was sufficient proof that it was wrong. And that a careful examination of the thing was appropriate.
I hope you've since learned that's not always the case. I also have to wonder what happened to that "careful examination", because so far I've only witnessed wild speculation from you.
It can be argued (easily) that widespread adoption of an idea or belief is an indication that the idea simply appeals to widely held prejudices, preconceptions and worldviews. While holding a rare or even unique, idea or belief can be said to have the benefit of being devoid of group-think, and possibly be evidence of original thought.
The opposite can also be argued, since both views would be purely speculative. It's as easy to be pro as it is to be anti, the latter only requires the negation of common prejudices, which is exactly what you are doing here.
I no longer pursue that line of thought on a daily basis. Not because it holds no merit, but because It caused me a lot of headaches. Partly because questioning everything all the time is time-consuming, but mostly because swimming against the tide like that is VERY exhausting.
Your line of thought never required questioning anything. As you said yourself you believed that the wisdom of crowds is always wrong; you rejected ideas without even trying to understand them; that doesn't require any thought at all! I'm not making this up, you said that your self! Being anti, however, carries the burden of having to swim against the tide, but that's what you get for your unfounded prejudice against the wisdom of crowds.
There are no Home or End keys on Apple keyboards. Darwin is all about implementing a very specific paradigm where all the directory hierarchy within bundles is preserved in the filesystem, and the file manager provides an abstraction that enables that regardless of how the underlying operating system works. This is why your drive is formatted as case-insensitive HFS+ by default as well as why accessing your home directory directly from the file manager is such an unintuitive task (your home directory, from Darwin's paradigm, is supposed to be the Desktop).
Power users and developers are expected to be proficient with a command line shell, so adding support for advanced operations to the file manager wouldn't accomplish anything, not to mention that no matter what they did, they'd never be able to support everything you can do with a command line shell, so it's not even worth trying.
Lastly, while Apple is about making everything easy, they're also about following a consistent paradigm so that users who aren't too proficient with computers can quickly deduce everything based on a consistent user experience, which means not mimicking Windows or whatever you may be used to. As a power user and developer who put effort into understanding the Apple way I can tell you that to me all other platforms feel like huge usability hazards.
Nobody uses X Servers for what they were designed (though I don't dislike the concept), and the only problem with HTTP is that people are abusing it for things that it shouldn't be used. By design, HTTP is a stateless pull protocol, and people are abusing it by forcing state, streaming, and pushing for no good reason.
Lack of perfection is not the problem, the problem are high level idiots with influence reinventing high level wheels full of compromises because they don't know better and should have never been engineers.
I've never understood what the whole Twitter fad is all about. For SMS messages, at least the length limit has a technical purpose. For artistic reasons, extreme limits sometimes work as well. But for expressing thoughts or anything?
It's a service for people to express whatever the fuck goes on in their mind, a microblog if you like. It also serves as an extremely effective way to alert people to local events of relevance since tweets are curated and retweeted by the public. It provides the benefits of RSS feeds without the drawbacks (you don't need to setup a website), has privacy options so that not everything you say is public, gives you the ability to target specific people that are not following you, allows you to target specific trends that others may be following without requiring them to follow you, etc. While Twitter is not the ideal place to express complex thoughts, it is the ideal place to sparkle a debate by providing teasing headlines and links to articles with complex thoughts.
If anything, Twitter is living reminder that I don't understand the world anymore. I simply don't get it, and I don't understand how the company can be worth more than, say, the pub down the street.
If you don't understand the world, have you considered the possibility that you may be a retard?
Then again, 10 billion doesn't go very far these days with acquisitions. And thinking about it, there really isn't anything Apple should buy. Whatever technology that would work with their products should be developed by them because I can't think of anything else out there that would fit into their way of doing things - buying something would be buying a product and culture clash.
There are plenty of things that they can pay for (not buy, and this isn't about buying either), if nothing else then just to stop competitors from accessing them. This isn't even news, that's how they've been operating all along, not always successfully, but when they succeed it gives them a huge advantage in the market. Thunderbolt is a very well known example of this strategy -- during the first year, Thunderbolt was exclusive to Apple, then Intel was allowed to sell to everyone else. While it didn't have much of an impact, the potential exists. Cases of other manufacturers having problems finding suppliers for specific components or materials due to the existing suppliers being bound to Apple are not unheard of.
This is disingenuous, because it says nothing about what you're actually *buying* for that price. If an iPad is $500 worth of hardware in a $700 package, and a Galaxy Tab is $600 worth of hardware in a $700 package, then it really doesn't matter that they're the same price; the Galaxy Tab is the better deal, all other things considered.
Can you name a reason for people to care about actual hardware when iOS is known to perform much better and be a lot more responsive than Android? Why should a user care about purchasing a product with better hardware specs when it actually performs worse than the competition? And this is not to mention a very specific detail about the hardware that you seem to be ignoring: the A5X completely destroys the Tegra in OpenGL benchmarks while being owned on the CPU performance. One question you have to ask here is: what is the CPU actually being used for in the tablet? Even on the desktop, where you actually perform CPU-intensive tasks, CPU performance has been losing relevance, so why would that be such a big deal on a tablet? The only logical explanation I see for adding extra CPU to an appliance that really doesn't need it is because the firmware is too slow, but then you are compensating in an area for the shortcomings of another, which should be part of your consideration!
The average consumer has 8,000 in credit card debt and are therefore really stupid. I do not follow their example of overspending for products I don't need, especially when I can get the same product for much les ($5 cellphone, $15 internet, $23 Dish TV, $15,000 Civic, et cetera).
The same product? Just because you choose the cheap, bottom-line stuff, doesn't mean that's ideal for everybody, or that the more expensive products aren't actually superior. Your standards are not everybody's standards, and if I extend this example to your laptop example I can already tell that you've made a lot of compromises on your choice (such as screen quality, construction quality, battery life, graphics processor, heat dissipation, RAM, keyboard, touchpad, etc.). I'm fine with people wasting money wisely and compromising when they feel that they can live without certain features; I am, however, not fine with people telling others that the only way to live is by their standards. To Apple you are not target audience, it's that simple. Jobs made that perfectly clear when he stated that he did not know of a way to make a computer that cost $500 and was not a piece of junk.
Yesterday I gave my sister a $300 netbook. By my standards what I bought was a piece of crap, but since all she does with it is to browse the web and watch Youtube videos from time to time, it served the purpose of replacing her 8 year old HP perfectly. That doesn't mean I consider my MacBook Pro, which was 6 times as expensive, to be overpriced -- it's my only computer, I don't need anything else, it runs everything including current-gen games, serves as a desktop connected to a Thunderbolt Display, and comes with me wherever I go.
Apple products are way over-priced, and Apple's "control freakery" is a constant annoyance.
Feel free to not buy from them. Other consumers clearly disagree with you, and so does the competition, which is selling products at the same price.
In terms of features, and performance, Apple often lags behind the competition.
What competition? What features? What performance?
Then there is the distastfulness of Apple's business practices. In this regard, Apple is worse than Microsoft by miles. From Apple's slave labor, to Apple's lack of environmental concerns, to Apple constant litigious scams.
Apple is pretty open about their business practices. What exactly is it that you don't trust about them? You may dislike their business practices, but that doesn't mean they can't be trusted.
Regarding the rest of your comment, can you provide evidence regarding that slave labor, lack of environmental concerns, and litigious scams you talk about? Do you even know what you're talking about? Are you aware that it has been shown that none of that is actually true? Please provide evidence so that I can provide counter-evidence.
How will they ever know when they are right if they refuse to find out if their wrong? Random chance? Depending on others to do the heavy thinking for them, and simply assuming they couldn't ever be wrong? It's never irrational to ask others to think or do research. It's irrational not to.
It is, however, irrational to accept a claim as truth without proof, and this is why the burden of proof lies with the one making charges. So if you think your claim that goes against the established belief is right and you can prove it, then go ahead and fulfil your burden of proof.
Slashdot Mirror
Source?
Then LG would have to come out and make that prior art claim, which strangely enough they haven't, at least not legally...
Everyone in this industry abuses patent law, but they are even worse than Apple because instead of actually going to court and having the validity of their patents disputed, they engage in legal threats with smaller players with intent to extort! Apple isn't doing that, they're going after the big players and they're putting their patents to the test! Is it a bad thing? It is, but that's what patent law enables you to do, so as I mentioned before, don't blame the players, blame the game. Everybody plays that game, you're just not aware of it because they don't usually make it public! Apple isn't interested in money, they're just happy to do their thing, and in this case a bunch of other companies saw their success and started to copy them, which to me is a perfectly legitimate reason to bring them to court.
Can you please tell me exactly what that is supposed to prove? Announcing a product with a similar design is something they could have done even a day following Apple's announcements. It's not like they have to have an actual product for the announcement... Fact is that the phone you link to came out nearly a year after the iPhone, from which it borrows features (along with the BlackBerry, another powerful brand at the time). If anything, this proves that Samsung is all about freeloading on the competition's innovations.
After Apple showed the world how to make touch-friendly UIs, yes, it became obvious that touchscreen phones didn't need physical keyboards...
Touchscreen phones existed long before the iPhone, they were just not successful or practical because they lacked a proper firmware. It wasn't until Apple released the iPhone and showed the world how to design a proper touchscreen phone complete with a touch-friendly user interface that the designs gained popularity and everybody started to blatantly copy them. By focusing on individual patents rather than the whole argument you are missing this point entirely, so no wonder these legal battles don't make sense to you.
Smartphone design patterns! The domain is relevant!
No, because it would be unfeasible for Apple to copy LG in such a short amount of time, not to mention that the Prada never received a lot of attention thus making it even less reasonable for Apple to copy it specifically. Samsung, in the other hand, changed the design of their phones radically after the iPhone (which received a lot of attention) came out, and now there's even evidence that they were warned about the similarities and continued not to care, so they were aware and we are in the presence of bad faith.
The iPhone was patented before it was launched. Unless you can demonstrate that LG patented that design first, then no, I do not see how that would be of relevance.
The players can't survive unless they play the game, so hating them doesn't make that much sense. Everybody in this industry patents stuff and makes legal threats in hopes to extort smaller players through settlements, so in my opinion I think it's pretty good to actually see a company that came from the brink of bankruptcy be so open about their business practices and actually engage into patent wars against the once threatening big players that it now dwarves. You are not hating Apple because of how they do business, you are hating Apple because unlike others they are open about it, you are hating Apple because they're honest.
You can't claim the existence of prior art without an actual implementation, nor can you patent something that is currently not feasible to implement.
No it does not.
Doing the same thing over and over again equates to reselling on the same platform. EA can afford to port because they're huge, but their falling market cap won't allow them to tank forever. They had a spike in 2011 resulting from the Star Wars: The Old Republic hype (a PC-exclusive title), but once that was revealed to not be a worthy competitor to World of Warcraft their shares returned to their falling tendency.
Actually, "ports" only started to happen when the Saturn and the PlayStation came out, and since SEGA was a hardware vendor they could pretty much make it feasible to actually port stuff from the arcade without requiring a huge investment. This, however, was not the case for Nintendo or the PC, which were totally different platforms with totally different games, even if in some cases those games shared similar names you can think of them as completely new products since they were always complete rewrites. After the Saturn and the PlayStation (which still had a lot of exclusive games), you started to see some ports, but it wasn't until Microsoft entered the game (not pun intended) and made it easier to port stuff from/to the PC, that ports became common, and even then many developers still tried the best they could to distance themselves from the PS3 initially.
I don't see how the former could be feasible considering the timeframe. Regarding the latter, don't blame the players, blame the game.
They aren't suing LG as far as I know, so I don't see the relation, and there's strong evidence pointing to Samsung having actually and knowingly copied Apple's designs. Plus as I mention what matters are the dates in which patents are filed, not the time products come out. Once you file an application for a patent you can pretty much assume that it's public knowledge.
I'm neither playing victim nor trying to bring attention to anything. As a matter of fact the only person complaining about others here is you. In your own words, welcome to reality, where fairness is nothing more than an ideal and the people who have the means, do, while those that don't, complain. I see no point in your complaint about others, especially since you acknowledge that the world is unfair. Are you against trying to make it fairer? Are you against the expression of opinions? Are you against fairness? Are you a fanboy? Because honestly I see no other logical reasons for your stance!
Accomplishing shit is easier when have an advantage. Try starting a company with no money to begin with and no stable family to fall back to if you fail..
The Prada came out only 4 months before the iPhone, furthermore that tells you nothing about previous research or patent applications. If Apple had iPad prototypes as early as 2004, imagine when they started to think about and patent iPhone designs, especially considering that the first iPhone concept is from 1983 (totally different from what it is now, but serves to show just how long Apple has been thinking about the iPhone)...
We'll never know about the projects they could have spent the same resources developing... What I said is that given the choice between porting and creating something new, it's dumb to port. Did Rovio had the choice to create something new? I don't know, so I can not answer your question.
The public seems to disagree a lot with you, especially when it comes to Deus Ex.
And who ports the abstraction layer that provides the platform-agnosticism? Here you have someone who actually does that questioning the merits of a specific platform, so if you can't convince these people to do the heavy lifting for you, how can you keep yourself platform-agnostic? Specifying and maintaining a proper abstraction layer takes an awful lot of time, and that's what this is all about.
It's not worth it when you can spend the same amount of time developing something new for the actually profitable platform. You are wrong in every possible aspect, you demonstrate lack of experience, and your grammar sucks. Your claims of intelligence or competence are very hard to believe at this point.
That's a feature, not a limitation. People are less likely to care about what you post if you post an essay than if you post a teasing headline with a link to an essay.
I don't use social networks either, including Twitter, but that hasn't stopped me from understanding their purpose and appeal.
Tthat must be why both the OS X market share and Mac sales are increasing in a stagnant PC market as well as why Microsoft is slowly phasing out their graphical user interface on the Windows 8 Server...
Actually there is no rationality in beliefs. They are not facts and do not constitute evidence of any kind. It is OK to believe. What is not OK is to tell others that their beliefs are wrong without presenting actual evidence to support that claim, because without evidence it doesn't make sense for you to consider your belief any more valid than other people's.
That's speculation and has no place in logical debates. As a counter to your speculation I could also claim that successful companies are those that undermine their competitors the most, usually from a position of advantage. How would you refute my belief without actual evidence? And why should I give any more credence to your belief than to mine? This is where burden of proof enters the game -- in this context I would have burden of proof since I would be the one making charges (i.e.: I would be the one claiming that your belief is wrong).
I hope you've since learned that's not always the case. I also have to wonder what happened to that "careful examination", because so far I've only witnessed wild speculation from you.
The opposite can also be argued, since both views would be purely speculative. It's as easy to be pro as it is to be anti, the latter only requires the negation of common prejudices, which is exactly what you are doing here.
Your line of thought never required questioning anything. As you said yourself you believed that the wisdom of crowds is always wrong; you rejected ideas without even trying to understand them; that doesn't require any thought at all! I'm not making this up, you said that your self! Being anti, however, carries the burden of having to swim against the tide, but that's what you get for your unfounded prejudice against the wisdom of crowds.
There are no Home or End keys on Apple keyboards. Darwin is all about implementing a very specific paradigm where all the directory hierarchy within bundles is preserved in the filesystem, and the file manager provides an abstraction that enables that regardless of how the underlying operating system works. This is why your drive is formatted as case-insensitive HFS+ by default as well as why accessing your home directory directly from the file manager is such an unintuitive task (your home directory, from Darwin's paradigm, is supposed to be the Desktop).
Power users and developers are expected to be proficient with a command line shell, so adding support for advanced operations to the file manager wouldn't accomplish anything, not to mention that no matter what they did, they'd never be able to support everything you can do with a command line shell, so it's not even worth trying.
Lastly, while Apple is about making everything easy, they're also about following a consistent paradigm so that users who aren't too proficient with computers can quickly deduce everything based on a consistent user experience, which means not mimicking Windows or whatever you may be used to. As a power user and developer who put effort into understanding the Apple way I can tell you that to me all other platforms feel like huge usability hazards.
Nobody uses X Servers for what they were designed (though I don't dislike the concept), and the only problem with HTTP is that people are abusing it for things that it shouldn't be used. By design, HTTP is a stateless pull protocol, and people are abusing it by forcing state, streaming, and pushing for no good reason.
Lack of perfection is not the problem, the problem are high level idiots with influence reinventing high level wheels full of compromises because they don't know better and should have never been engineers.
It's a service for people to express whatever the fuck goes on in their mind, a microblog if you like. It also serves as an extremely effective way to alert people to local events of relevance since tweets are curated and retweeted by the public. It provides the benefits of RSS feeds without the drawbacks (you don't need to setup a website), has privacy options so that not everything you say is public, gives you the ability to target specific people that are not following you, allows you to target specific trends that others may be following without requiring them to follow you, etc. While Twitter is not the ideal place to express complex thoughts, it is the ideal place to sparkle a debate by providing teasing headlines and links to articles with complex thoughts.
If you don't understand the world, have you considered the possibility that you may be a retard?
There are plenty of things that they can pay for (not buy, and this isn't about buying either), if nothing else then just to stop competitors from accessing them. This isn't even news, that's how they've been operating all along, not always successfully, but when they succeed it gives them a huge advantage in the market. Thunderbolt is a very well known example of this strategy -- during the first year, Thunderbolt was exclusive to Apple, then Intel was allowed to sell to everyone else. While it didn't have much of an impact, the potential exists. Cases of other manufacturers having problems finding suppliers for specific components or materials due to the existing suppliers being bound to Apple are not unheard of.
Can you name a reason for people to care about actual hardware when iOS is known to perform much better and be a lot more responsive than Android? Why should a user care about purchasing a product with better hardware specs when it actually performs worse than the competition? And this is not to mention a very specific detail about the hardware that you seem to be ignoring: the A5X completely destroys the Tegra in OpenGL benchmarks while being owned on the CPU performance. One question you have to ask here is: what is the CPU actually being used for in the tablet? Even on the desktop, where you actually perform CPU-intensive tasks, CPU performance has been losing relevance, so why would that be such a big deal on a tablet? The only logical explanation I see for adding extra CPU to an appliance that really doesn't need it is because the firmware is too slow, but then you are compensating in an area for the shortcomings of another, which should be part of your consideration!
The same product? Just because you choose the cheap, bottom-line stuff, doesn't mean that's ideal for everybody, or that the more expensive products aren't actually superior. Your standards are not everybody's standards, and if I extend this example to your laptop example I can already tell that you've made a lot of compromises on your choice (such as screen quality, construction quality, battery life, graphics processor, heat dissipation, RAM, keyboard, touchpad, etc.). I'm fine with people wasting money wisely and compromising when they feel that they can live without certain features; I am, however, not fine with people telling others that the only way to live is by their standards. To Apple you are not target audience, it's that simple. Jobs made that perfectly clear when he stated that he did not know of a way to make a computer that cost $500 and was not a piece of junk.
Yesterday I gave my sister a $300 netbook. By my standards what I bought was a piece of crap, but since all she does with it is to browse the web and watch Youtube videos from time to time, it served the purpose of replacing her 8 year old HP perfectly. That doesn't mean I consider my MacBook Pro, which was 6 times as expensive, to be overpriced -- it's my only computer, I don't need anything else, it runs everything including current-gen games, serves as a desktop connected to a Thunderbolt Display, and comes with me wherever I go.
Feel free to not buy from them. Other consumers clearly disagree with you, and so does the competition, which is selling products at the same price.
What competition? What features? What performance?
Apple is pretty open about their business practices. What exactly is it that you don't trust about them? You may dislike their business practices, but that doesn't mean they can't be trusted.
Regarding the rest of your comment, can you provide evidence regarding that slave labor, lack of environmental concerns, and litigious scams you talk about? Do you even know what you're talking about? Are you aware that it has been shown that none of that is actually true? Please provide evidence so that I can provide counter-evidence.
It is, however, irrational to accept a claim as truth without proof, and this is why the burden of proof lies with the one making charges. So if you think your claim that goes against the established belief is right and you can prove it, then go ahead and fulfil your burden of proof.