Ditching DVDs would be all well and good if the availability of streaming content were more than a small fraction of the physical DVD library. Most of the stuff I want is only available in physical media. I cannot fathom why the studios are so reluctant to make their backlists available for streaming, but they are.

I would argue that the 3G was the truly revolutionary product, not because of anything in the hardware but because it introduced the App Store and user-installable native apps.

Now, how about a way to the rest of us to turn off all Spotify notifications in our news feeds and tickers.

One prediction: ARM (and Intel too) will have 64-core chips long before Apple or anyone else has a commercial operating system that can use them efficiently in desktops, laptops, or tablets.

I have to disagree with you on this one. The people who doubted the Apple move to Intel in 2005 had no idea of what they were talking about. IBM had made it quite clear that it had no interest in further development of Power for anything but servers and Apple had no real choice.

Why the move to ARM makes no sense:

--If Intel can deliver on the promise of Ivy Bridge, x86 becomes far more competitive with ARM in power efficiency. Admittedly, Intel has a history of overpromising and underdelivering in this area, but the new process looks like a genuine breakthrough. If it is, it is more likely to get x86 into tablets than ARM into laptops.
--ARM might make sense in the Air. But Intel will have a ULV Sandy Bridge part soon. and it would be a disaster to use different processor types in different members of the family. And it is really hard to imagine MacBook Pros, iMacs, and Mac Pro going to ARM because they would take a vast hit in processor power.
--Apropos of that last point, it has been barely five years since Apple put developers through the wringer of having to rewrite all their code for Intel. For big complex packages like Adobe CS and Microsoft Office, not to mention more exotic media production software, this is a big, expensive deal.

There's been a lot of talk about ARM replacing x86 on servers, but nearly all of it has been just that--talk. And servers make a lot more sense because many server tasks are I/O bound and put very little stress on the CPU.

Except for the Air, the Mac market is very performance conscious (and I suspect most Air owners have another Mac around; I have both a PowerBook and an iMac.) ARM just doesn't make sense for this market.

That's true, but I don't think the Moto box ever actually shipped. I remember seeing it at Comdex in probably 94 or 95.

<div class="idc-message" id="idc-comment-msg-div-144002235"><a class="idc-close" title="Click to Close Message" href="javascript: IDC.ui.close_message(144002235)"><span>Close Message</span> Comment posted. <p class="idc-nomargin"><a class="idc-share-facebook" onclick="IDC.ui.fb_wrapper(144002235)" href="javascript: void(null)" style="text-decoration: none;"><span class="idc-share-inner"><span>Share on Facebook</span></span> or <a href="javascript: IDC.ui.close_message(144002235)">Close MessageThe Supreme Court ruled more than 20 years ago that the look and feel of a software program was not covered by copyright (Borland v. Lotus.) Apple is trying on patent and trademark grounds. For patent, they would have to show very specific infringement, but you can't patent look and feel. Trademark is trickier--there is the concept of "trade dress," such as the shape of a Coke bottle. But I don't know that rectangular and flat with icons in a grid is trademarkable.

Many years ago, I needed an estimate for the gross domestic product of China (before the PRC had really joined the world economy.) The CIA was the go-to agency for such things, so I asked an analyst. He said something like $852.7 billion. So I asked, "How many of those digitas are significant?" and he said "Maybe the first."

People seem to thing that adding spurious precision to numbers like this makes them sound more authoritative. It's a good lesson in the difference between precision and accuracy.

Note typo in headline.

Actually, Apple was supposed to build common hardware reference platform (CHRP) Macs that could run NT, but Apple quickly abandoned CHRP. The only CHRP machine that ever really made it to market was the R/6000, and IBM wanted it to run AIX, not Windows.