Posts by Sean Timarco Baggaley

Re: Tea? FFS

I worked in construction for a short period and I can assure you, the formula goes thus:

Breakfast, or Lunch:

Bacon—this is surprisingly easy: fry, or grill, according to taste. There's no accounting for it, so there'll never be an ISO Bacon Standard.

Bread—sliced, white. Its purpose is to stop the grease from getting all over your fingers. It's a container that should taste of as little as possible. Like a soft, absorbent, somewhat spongy, form of water.

Butter—some, but not too much. Its purpose is to keep the bacon from falling out of its sliced-bread container.

Tea—comes in two varieties:

- In a plastic cup, from a machine in the site office, or,

- in a slightly chipped mug from the nearest greasy spoon café to the work site.

Add sugar to taste.

In the case of the machine-generated tea, continue to add sugar until plastic stirrer remains upright.

Condiments—according to taste, but should only ever be applied thinly. If you wanted to taste the ketchup instead of the bacon, you should have ordered tomato soup.

Salad—only if you have been advised to go on a diet by some killjoy with a degree and no f*cking clue what it's like working halfway up a half-finished block of flats in the middle of winter. Or the wife. (Girlfriends lack sufficient rank.)

See? Easy.

Re: Jesus Christ on toast.

"Most people hate trackpads, one of the first laptop add-ons purchased is a mouse."

Ah, anecdata plucked from thin air. I haven't used a mouse in over a year now and I sure as hell don't miss it.

People who "hate" trackpads don't actually hate them. They just hate change. Their loss. Especially if they're then going out and buying an accessory that offers them less control and more RSI.

"As for getting people to use keyboard shortcuts, about 50% of users still use a mouse to move between fields on the screen, and click OK, even after being shown how to use tab and enter, they use the mouse clicks for cut and paste instead of ctrl-c ctrl-v."

So this "50%" of people you claim (without any sources) still use a mouse. So what? Their inefficiency and unwillingness to learn how to use a tool that is part of their job is hardly Apple or Microsoft's fault. And, do note, both companies still support the point-and-click option too.

"The trouble with keyboard shortcuts is lack of consistency in applications..."

Apple have very strict guidelines about GUIs in applications. Your app can even be rejected from their App Stores if you fail to adhere to them. Microsoft also have a series of guidelines, though they're nowhere near as anal about them.

On Windows, CTRL+P is usually "Print", CTRL+O is "(File) Open"; CTRL+S is "Save", and so on. (On OS X, just swap the "CTRL" with "CMD".) Need to change a Windows application's settings? "Tools > Options..." On OS X, it's the "Preferences..." command in the menu named after the application itself—shortcut: (CMD+comma key).

Good application developers, who don't treat support as a primary revenue stream, do go for consistency, although Microsoft themselves do like to try new ideas every now and then. (Their "ribbon" UI is far, far better than the previous icon-heavy toolbars, even for Office veterans like myself who remember using MS Word for DOS.)

The File, Edit, Tools, Windows and Help menus are usually handled pretty consistently as those are menus Visual Studio will often create for you if you use one of its application project templates. If you opt for the Ribbon UI, you can make your application fit that model consistently too.

There are exceptions though: many graphics tools, like 3d studio max, Maya, etc., are cross-platform and either roll their own GUI and pretend the OS's native one doesn't exist, or they use the godawful Qt library. (I sincerely hope Qt dies a horrible, painful, slow death. It's responsible for some truly awful UIs.) If your work relies on such applications, I can understand the frustration, but nothing Microsoft can do will change that, so Windows 8's GUI changes are an irrelevance in such arguments.

I've also used enough GNU / Linux applications to know nobody in that community can even spell "consistency", let alone apply it.

Re: but I thought I just read that Samsung sells more phones than Apple.

Ford sell rather more cars than Bentley do, but the latter beats the former in customer satisfaction.

Customer satisfaction isn't an indicator of market share. It's an indicator of how people feel after they've made their purchase.

Methane capture. They may be animal tormentors, but at least they're eco-friendly animal tormentors.

Re: Free Fix!!!

"Here's free fix, get a high backed chair, and tip it 45deg, with the top edge under the handle..."

Or you could just throw the bolt. If you're in the room already, you will be the burglar's biggest problem, not the lock.

In any case, it's even easier to break into a hotel room by simply masquerading as one of the hotel's own staff. Pick up master keycard when you arrive. Burgle away to your heart's content. Job done, and no need to splash out a five-figure sum on a keycard hacking system.

Re: So I'm descended from an ancient turkey?

No, only the language.

People don't seem to realise that the British Isles weren't so much "invaded" by the Celts, Romans, Angles, Saxons and Normans as "taken over" by them. What were considered major battles at the time often consisted of just a single percentage of the land's actual population. What happened was that a band of thugs came over, beat up the resident thugs, and took over the reins of power, imposing their own cultural preferences on their subjects.

The Ancient Britons spoke a language very similar, but not identical, to Welsh for the most part, although there would have been some very strong variations in accent and dialect even back then due to the lack of good communications. (Think of the difference between Geordie, Scouse, Brummie, etc. today. And those exist despite the invention of mechanised travel and both radio and TV.) Similarly, when the Romans "invaded" and usurped the land from the Ancient Britons, the Celtic cultures slowly faded away in favour of the Roman one.

That does not mean millions of Italians came to England and kicked all the locals into Wales. Instead, the cultural changes spread organically throughout the land—in part, because running water, underfloor heating, sewage and other infrastructure, and very lucrative trade, were a major step up from the cold, muddy, Celtic stockaded villages full of hovels they replaced.

The locals simply compared what they had with the new options made available to them and decided to trade up.

The Welsh and Scottish Highlands proved a major obstacle to the Romans and so saw very little Roman influence, which is how the Celtic culture remained in that neck of the woods. The Romans didn't bother invading Ireland at all. The Romans never entirely conquered the south-west of England either.

Modern Welsh is not the same language as old Welsh. It includes some influences from the later invaders of England, including a number of adapted loan words, but it does retains the Celtic base-20 counting system that didn't disappear entirely from the English language until well into the 18th Century. ("Four score and seven years ago...") Modern French still retains that component, hence their bizarre counting system. ("Quattre-vingt-dix" for "90". In Belgium and Canada, they just say "novante". In Italian, it's "novanta".)

When the Romans left, the power vacuum led to the rise of Angle and Saxon influence from what is now northern Germany. The feudal system meant that all the commoners saw was a change of ownership at the local manor or castle. Naturally, the newcomers imposed their own cultural values on the natives.

And then came the French Vikings in 1066. Old French is the source of most of English's Latin influences. Old English was basically a dialect of Frisian up to that point. Italian itself didn't really enter the picture until the Renaissance era, but that only really affected some arts and crafts rather than embedding itself right into the heart of the language. It was a brief Victorian fad for all things Latin that changed "fall" into "autumn". Italy didn't even exist as a single country back then.

(Incidentally, the common military term for a "war game" right up until WW1 was "kriegspiel". The British Royal Family is German and there was a very strong pro-German culture up to that time as a result. The Saxe-Coburg and Gotha family changed its name to "Windsor" in 1917 due to the anti-German propaganda of the time.)

"Sabato"—literally "Sabbath"—is the Italian word for Saturday today. But "Saturday" itself derives from "Saturn's Day" and came from the Normans. (Italians use "Domenica" instead of "Sunday", which is another word derived from the country's most famous religion: It translates approximately to "Day of Our Lord" and shares the same root as "Domini".)

The above shows just how far Christianity influenced the Italian language. (The Papal States had a lot to do with it.) But that religion clearly didn't impose similar changes beyond the Italian peninsula. Instead, early Christian missionaries preferred to adapt to the existing customs, so the old Norse weekday names remained.

And that's just one tiny aspect of how languages change over time. It's a very, very complex subject.

Re: I completely disagree

@CmdrX3:

This lawsuit began over two years ago and was in regard to Samsung's products at that time. Android was still essentially a blatant iOS clone at the time, which didn't help. Its GUI only really started down its own (visually less derivative) path with the v3.x and v4.x releases, but most Android users are still on that 2.x series even today, so Apple's point still stands.

For those who insist that software != hardware, bear in mind that Apple's design philosophy does NOT separate the two: the software GUI is considered an integral part of the entire product design. Apple are a hardware company, not a software company. Their software is just another component, like a GPU or a display panel. THAT is where Samsung's lawyers kept going wrong: assuming that laypeople could tell where the hardware ends and the software begins. That's a nerd distinction. I've had to deal with customers who genuinely believed their PC was running an operating system called "Windows Office".

As far as most non-IT people are concerned, the device's design includes both its hardware and its software. If your device is a rectangular slab of glass with a button on edge, and rows of square-ish icons on its screen, they're really going to struggle to spot the difference.

Just ask Samsung's own lawyers, if you don't believe me.

Stop artificially separating hardware and software components in a device. It really helps when trying to argue design issues. Samsung copied Apple. They've admitted it repeatedly: there's even a bloody document that says it was policy at the time to copy every feature from Apple's devices.

And Steve Jobs never, ever, made any secret of the fact that Apple had patented their research and development to the hilt. He even said as much in the presentation for the original iPad's launch.

Note, too, that Apple are NOT suing Motorola over their keyboard-dock-and-tablet Transformer devices. Nor are they going after a number of other, financially easier, targets. Because most of Samsung's fellow Android licensees are NOT just slavishly copying the iPad and iPhone. They're actually creating some original products.

*

On a completely separate note: Apple haven't been responsible for Java on OS X since the release of OS X "Lion" (v10.7, which was released in summer last year.) Neither OS X 10.7, nor the just-released 10.8 ("Mountain Lion") include a Java VM any more. The responsibility for patching and maintaining Java is Oracle's.

Re: Mouse travel

Also: OS X supports adding keyboard shortcuts to any menu item in any application as standard.

Power users therefore assign such shortcuts to commands they use most often and therefore hardly ever have to touch the mouse or trackpad anyway. (The user-defined shortcuts appear in the menus automatically—you don't even have to quite the application—and, yes, it'll work with Microsoft's apps too. It's a built-in feature of the Cocoa API; developers don't have to do anything to support it.)

When I use Windows, I find I prefer its CUA-derived keyboard support. I find [ALT]+F(ile) > O(pen) much easier to remember than seemingly arbitrary combinations of modifier keys and random letters for the more direct command shortcuts. The CUA system has the advantage of being (a) universal: any menu command can be accessed using this system, even if it lacks a direct shortcut; (b) consistent in every properly designed application, and (c), it's very easy to learn. Especially if your memory works best with spatial data.

This is one area where Apple did the right thing: their keyboards have had three modifier keys since the first Mac was launched. MS-DOS had just CTRL and ALT, while Windows 95 added that Windows Logo key. The latter has quite a few system-wide shortcuts linked to it that most people know nothing about, but I've never seen it used directly in applications, so it's basically wasted. Which is a shame, really.

It'll be interesting to see where Apple take this with OS XI. I suspect they'll ditch the ancient desktop metaphor entirely with that one. And Microsoft clearly want their developers to move towards Metro instead of the traditional desktop interface too.

Re: Yes

"How many more disasters before you work out that ANY non-trivial industry is not inherently safe and never will be as long as we allow humans to design, build and control them?"

There, fixed that for you.

Number of people killed by renewable electricity generation at Vajont, in 1963: over 2000.

Entire towns and villages were literally wiped off the map. Entire families killed. In some villages, nothing at all remained to even suggest a village had stood there.

And that's just ONE example of how other, non-nuclear, industries can fucking things up on a truly monumental scale.

Now, let's look at coal-fired power stations. How about this trivial little incident? What about the Piper Alpha disaster? Or the Deepwater Horizon? How much do you think has been spent so far on the oil spillages that cost billions of dollars, and many, many years, to clean up?

Here's a hint: they're still cleaning up after the Exxon Valdez, which occurred [i]over 22 years ago.[/i] Yes, it'll take 30 years to clean up after Fukushima, but one of the reasons for it is that there was also a major, far more harmful, earthquake and tsunami in the same area too. Unlike the Fukushima structures, most of the surrounding residential homes were destroyed. Which, incidentally, is one of the reasons why many are in no particular hurry to return as they have nothing to return [i]to.[/i]

What about the Aberfan mining waste landslide in Wales that wiped out almost an entire school full of children?

What about the Bhopal disaster (over 12000 dead)?

And you weirdoes still think nuclear power is still "inherently worse" than coal, hydroelectric or oil and gas? We know how to handle nuclear waste: subduction zones would do it for peanuts. Breeder reactors will let us recycle the fuel multiple times, making it much more cost-effective too.

But none of that stuff can happen until the vocally ignorant stop spreading so much idiotic FUD.

As for the decommissioning of nuclear power stations: how much do you think it costs to sort out a contaminated brownfield site that was once an oil refinery or chemical plant?

Energy generation is an industry. All forms of energy production have their whole-life costs. When all those offshore wind farms become life-expired, do you think dismantling them and towing their carcasses back to the mainland for recycling—and an awful lot of landfill—will be free?

If you're going to apply such high standards to the nuclear energy industry, you'd better have a bloody good reason for not applying equally high standards to every other form of electricity generation.

Re: Willing to be flamed for this, but.....

"If freedom of speech means I can say what I like, and offend who I like, can I post rascist comments on the Reg?"

No. Your rights and freedoms are inherently limited to public areas and your own property.

The Register's forums are NOT a public space; they're akin to a company's office entrance lobby or meeting room. You have no more "right" to go on a racist rant on these forums than you have to enter the offices of PIXAR and rant away in their cafeteria. Doing either of those will get you very forcibly ejected. With extreme prejudice.

Because owners of private property DO have a right to tell you to f*ck off. It's their space, not yours.

This is something that many people who post on internet forums need to understand. Any forums that have terms of use that you agreed to have every right to enforce those terms. You don't get to claim "Freedom of Speech!" as an excuse for bad behaviour.

Every action has consequences, the freedom to say whatever you wish included. You can shout "FIRE!" in a crowded theatre—that's your freedom right there. But that freedom ends at the point where it impacts upon the freedoms of others; it's therefore the theatre owners' equally valuable right to have you arrested and charged for the consequences of your action.

The Facebook page in the original article is an interesting case: the posters themselves could theoretically be prosecuted too, but it'd be a legal nightmare: many posts will have been made by underaged users who can't be held to the Facebook terms of service anyway. Trawling through every post and trying to find out legally admissible information about them would, in any case, take ages and cost a fortune.

However, the Facebook page itself is also subject to those terms of service and THAT is why they are facing jail. Facebook is not a "public" space; it's a private service.

Re: All browsers are already good enough

@Vic 4: "You'd be surprised the demands full featured web apps can place on a browser."

Not really. I'm far more surprised by the fact so many people seriously consider a bloody web browser to be a good fit for "full featured" applications.

Re: Quantum graphity

So you're suggesting Microsoft caused the Big Bang in the first place?

That gives a whole new meaning to "Quantum Gates".

Re: nice hardware...

"the world's most popular mobile OS"

Which version of Android would that be, then? Most Android devices today are still running v2.x. ICS and Jelly Bean are both still very rare in the wild.

You're also using exactly the same "All those millions of people can't be wrong!" rhetoric that resulted in the PC's and Windows success too. After all, Windows is by far the most popular desktop OS out there, so, by your logic, it must be awesome, right?

Mere popularity implies nothing about quality. Just ask the inventors of Betamax.

Re: Hi, Mr. Cynical here

"Have a look at the teardowns on isuppli.com - a 16Gb iPhone 4S costs around $196 (say £125) to make. Transport costs, software licences not included."

iFixIt's tear downs conveniently ignore all the hidden costs of producing devices like these. That miniaturisation doesn't just happen. There's the R&D needed to design the hardware; the manufacturing processes, which usually change with each new model; the logistics of ensuring all the components arrive just in time, and no earlier or later; the packaging design and manufacturing; the distribution and shipping logistics, and so on. (This is why Tim Cook was hired by Jobs, incidentally. He's very, very good at solving those logistical puzzles.)

Then there's the cash spent on marketing and PR—in multiple countries. Remember those "I'm a PC / I'm a Mac" ads? The UK ads used a different pair of comedians. As did the Italians. And they were adapted and localised to account for cultural differences. Again, that's not cheap.

And that's before you get into all the faff and hassle of getting certification from the FCC, EU, China, etc., after which you THEN have to test the phones on individual operators' networks to get them to sell it on their networks.

And then there's the customer service and support infrastructure. Someone has to pay for those call centres. Someone has to pay for the infrastructure to handle the WEEE regulations too.

ALL of the above has to be paid for. ALL smartphone manufacturers have to cover these costs, not just Apple.

Finally, there's the development of iOS itself. This is something most of Apple's rivals don't have to pay for, yet they somehow manage to have no trouble charging the same—or even more—money for their devices than Apple do for their iPhones.

Odd, that.

Re: Does it matter?

"No, you buy premium and expect it to last longer without repair than non-premium."

Because, of course, Apple have access to Foxconn's magical, revolutionary new Zero Failures factory in Narnia.

I think you'll find that the equally expensive rival phones from, say, Samsung ("We let someone else do the R&D, so we don't have to") and their ilk are just as prone to the occasional failure.

As another poster pointed out, if your iPhone was bought in the EU, your warranty lasts 24 months. By law. There is no get-out clause Apple can use to get around that. (And, yes, that law applies in the UK as well, despite what many of the more ignorant, minimum-wage shelf-stackers at PC World may believe.)

But... you got it fixed for £17! Clearly the iPhone isn't all that hard to fix for someone with the right tools and knowledge! So what the hell is your problem? Who the hell takes their car to an expensive "official" repair centre (that is obliged to only ever use original parts!) when it's outside the warranty period? Even VW owners know better than that.

One very good reason for using weird screws and tricky manufacturing techniques is precisely so that they don't get loads of ignorant tinkerers trying to convince them their phone "just broke! Honest!" after they'd tried to pry it open and have a look inside for the sake of satiating their curiosity.

People who want to make money from repairing such products can still buy the necessary tools—as others have pointed out, it's not going to take long for a Chinese manufacturer to come up with a screwdriver head that matches this, or any other, design. Such people will likely include the chap who fixed your iPhone for less than twenty quid.

Short of completely sealing each unit and making it effectively disposable, there's not much Apple can do to prevent such repair operations. And I doubt very much that they want to go down that path as they have to abide by WEEE regulations, so repairing and recycling their products is part of their corporate duty.

"If you need to use even 16Mb RAM, I want to know why."

Triple-buffering a 2560 x 1440 pixel display requires 84 MB of RAM just for the display buffers. Most modern operating systems require the feature to provide the compositing features.

Now, using Display PDF might seem an odd choice for a GUI, but it's also the reason for OS X's ubiquitous PDF support: it's basically 'free' for developers. And this brings us to your next request:

"Give me Windows 3.1 looks, and the ability to run modern programs and then get the hell out of my way."

You're asking for mutually exclusive features: a low-footprint GUI that can run "modern programs". Modern programs rely on the rich APIs and features of modern operating systems. Operating systems aren't there for the benefit of end users: they're there for the benefit of developers. End users only ever see the pretty windows and icons—the user interface—but, as you've just shown, they don't really understand what's going on under the hood, or why operating systems are designed the way they are.

GNU / Linux distros have failed spectacularly in the consumer space precisely because the FOSS community haven't really understood the connection between that GUI and the underlying OS. If your OS forces me to jump through a thousand hoops just to get basic features into my application, why would I choose to develop for it when I can target the much more developer-friendly Windows and OS X?

OS X lets me build a complete database-driven application without writing more than a dozen or so lines of code. I could have a basic stock control application written in a week. Add another week and it'd be running on the iPad, and possibly even the iPhone too. The secret is in the Xcode IDE and the OS X (and iOS) APIs which do so much of the heavy lifting for me.

Windows leads the way here: Microsoft are, at heart, a developer tools company, not an OS company. (MS-DOS was bought in. Windows NT was the first fully home-grown OS Microsoft made.) Their operating systems are convenient packages of developer technologies and tools, with a nice GUI for end users to interact with them too. Visual Basic was arguably more of an attraction for corporate adoption of Windows 3.x than Microsoft Office: suddenly, custom business applications became a lot cheaper to build, allowing businesses to automate more tasks.

CDE is a throwback to the late '80s / early '90s approach in the UNIX community of separating everything from everything else. It's a very modular approach, so you can customise it to your own needs, but it also makes it inherently more difficult to code for if your goal is that of a consistent user experience. Which is why UNIX does so well in vertical markets where customisation is desirable—e.g. Android—yet fails badly in the consumer space where consistency and ease of development are far more important.

Your conflicting request proves my point. You literally cannot run a modern application on a 20-year-old GUI, because you can't build such applications on such flimsy foundations without expending far more effort and resources than it's worth.

Re: How things change

Modern speech synthesis uses a matrix of phonemes at its core. The "Siri" voice in the UK is the same as the "Daniel" voice available for OS X Lion / Mountain Lion users and is based on the voice of Jon Briggs.

Jon went into a studio some years ago and recorded 5000 phrases in a monotone voice. From those phrases, a complete set of phonemes was extracted and these are what the synthesiser plays, adding pitch and volume changes to simulate stress and intonation.

This is why, although Siri sounds a lot better than the older fully synthesised systems of old (think Prof. Stephen Hawking), we can still tell that it's a synthetic voice. When humans modulate their voices, they do so by changing a lot more than mere pitch and volume: they constrict their throat, move their tongue, lips and change mouth-shape, change how they breathe, and so on. Our ears are trained to notice these changes, so we're still in the voice synthesis equivalent of the Uncanny Valley. But we're getting pretty damned close.

Crossing the valley completely is technically feasible, but will require paying the voice artist to record those 5000 phrases multiple times, in multiple intonations and projection levels. That alone will add days to the recording process, and it'll be very, very boring. Once processed, the resulting voice phoneme set will also be much bigger—the UK "Siri" voice is a 500MB-ish download already—and that's the biggest problem. It'd take much, much longer to process the raw sample data and produce the final phoneme matrices, and it'll take up a whopping great chunk of storage space too. Realistically, computers will need to come with either much faster storage, or a lot more RAM, as standard.

Okay, maybe not porting a video-game, but an application.

(Why the hell doesn't the El Reg forum software not support editing of posts? It's an IT news website for f*ck's sake!)

@Moyra J. Bligh:

"I will never notice if it is gone - I consider it to be full of useless, ignorant, uniformed, inaccurate garbage."

That description would cover the entire World Wide Web, surely?

Re: Just wondering...

"How exactly would metadata help stop those dastardly "thieves" who dare to compose photos that are merely similar to others, such as in the infamous Temple Island case, for example?"

You do realise that judges are humans too, right? They're not infallible. This ridiculous ruling will—and certainly should—be overturned given that one of the core tents of Copyright Law is that you cannot copyright an idea; only its execution! The judge was wrong.

Re. The "Men At Work" case: Having heard the original folk piece as well as the "Men At Work" song, I can only assume the judge was tone deaf. The "Men At Work" song's flute riff is not the same as the nursery rhyme. It does have a similar feel and progression—the music video for the track even appears to acknowledge the nursery rhyme's influence—but there are more than enough differences between the two that anyone with reasonable musical skills should be able to tell them apart easily. I certainly can and I'm only an amateur keyboardist.

Still, such judgements are inherently subjective. And this is why we have courts.

Creative works are not "inherently derivative", however. Yes, there is no shortage of derivative works today—one of the curses of computers is that they make copying and pasting stuff very, very easy, hence all the endless remixes shite we get on each single now—but that does not make all creative works equally derivative. (Incidentally, The Fugees' "Ready Or Not" would have been a far better example for your argument: it's basically just them shouting someone else's lyrics over a slightly distorted loop of Enya's "Boadicea". That really was derivative, in every sense of the word. They didn't ask Enya's permission to use her track and she was not pleased.)

But the fact remains that the mere existence of shit does not mean everything is shit. Sturgeon's Law applies to everything, including creative works: 90% of everything is crud. But that still leaves the 10% that isn't.

Do you seriously believe that "Gulliver's Travels"—considered the Western world's first true novel—was "derivative"? If so, of what? How about games like "Pac-Man" and "Space Invaders"? Neither has an obvious predecessor that they could have been derived from.

You could argue also that Mozart, Beethoven and Bach were "derivative", because their music usually stuck to the conventions of the day. Yet Beethoven's famous "Ode To Joy" was the first time anyone had included a vocal and choral component in a symphony. Who, pray, did he derive that from?

Granted, there are often common design patterns – templates, even – that many lazier creative types love to use. The classic Hollywood movie formula is basically Vogler's "The Writer's Journey". This was most famously abused by George Lucas' first Star Wars movie—you can literally tick off each of the Archetypes in the same order as they appear in the book!

And, yes, Vogler's books are basically just a summary of Joseph Campbell's own "The Hero With A Thousand Faces". Vogler's work is clearly derivative here. Despite explicitly telling readers NOT to treat his book as a simple formula or template, Vogler's work has been used precisely in that way since the 1970s. Which is why 90% of Hollywood's output is crud.

This debate is not about that 90%. That 90% is sludge. Noise. It's not relevant to the discussion. The point is to encourage that remaining 10% to keep creating genuinely original works.

Re: I'm curious...

The comparison model was the 13" MacBook Air, not the MacBook Pro.

The Core i5 CPU in the MBA is 1.8 GHz component, not a 2.5 GHz one.

Apple also don't update their Boot Camp drivers more than a couple of times a year or so.

Nobody cares.

"We're all slowly nudging towards losing control of what we can put on our computers. Every version of Windows, Mac OS or smartphones OSes gradually increases restrictions."

Seriously? Ignorant, much?

Atari ST. Commodore Amiga. Sinclair ZX Spectrum. Amstrad CPC464. Timex 2000.

ALL of these were "closed" systems: you had no more control over what OS(es) they ran than you do over what OS a games console runs.

Choices are only worth having when they're meaningful, useful choices. Choice for its own sake merely confuses and annoys 90% of your customers. That's why GNU / Linux has only made it into consumer territory in any sizeable numbers through the actions of a mega-corporation called "Google", despite having existed since the days of Windows 3.1.

Good design matters. And good design is a hell of a lot easier to achieve when you get to design the whole device, from the hardware right down to the last byte of the software.