name99

This is a ridiculous answer. Yes, 3rd party apps are at fault - so what? That’s what makes it a hard problem requiring a careful solution. A “solution” that doesn’t actually work in practice is no solution at all.

Compare with what Apple did on iOS. There apps worked (just as well as before) out of the box. Revising them made them look better, but there was never a stage along the way where they looked awful.

“Put it this way… % of internet traffic for Facebook is big deal. And they put ads all over the site. The problem they’re facing is that people come to Facebook to see their friends.
Ironically a business that started from the social networks of college students has come back to bite them in the ass. College kids have no money.”

This is extremely stupid, short term thinking - and, IMHO, precisely why Zuckerberg didn’t want to go public, and structured the deal so that he doesn’t have to listen to investors. There are ways to make money that aren’t based on ads, because people naturally like to do things with each other, and will pay for that.

I’ve given examples before, but here’s one I keep returning to - a way for people to watch the same movie (in sync, pausing for everyone when one person pauses it) with a shared channel (voice and/or text) - copy the experience of all being in the same room watching the movie together. Show on your Facebook page “Joe is currently watching such-and-such movie with Joe and Sue, would you like to join them?” and Facebook gets a fraction of the money that goes to the movie company. Of course to make this work, you need a slick automatic payments system. Or, maybe, you pay $79 a year for Facebook prime, and part of that is you get access to a large library of movies and TV, and can see up to five of them shared in this way per month? Many possible revenue models.

Or a similar sort of thing, pairing with MMOG companies. Friends, who have no interest in really joining WoW or whatever can still (if they are part of Facebook Prime) occasionally join you in WoW and screw around for an hour, just seeing what it is like.

People WILL pay to do things with their friends. You just have to offer them an experience that is cool enough that it beats cobbling together some lame kinda-sorta version. This is the lesson of the iTunes store - people will pay, if the experience doesn’t suck.

Having 100 times the net worth of the company in stock doesn’t sit well with most investors in the long-term.

Amazon has been able to sustain it for a good long while… I mean right now it’s freaking 180! I don’t understand it at all, but there’s clearly a pool of investors willing to bet on some sort of long-term major upset; and I’ve no idea why these same people wouldn’t be willing to bet on Facebook.a

Not to mention that the Zenbook Prime ships with Windows scaling at 1.25x so
(a) not 2x
(b) the general consensus is that, even though MS has been at it since, what, XP?, fractional scaling still looks like garbage in most apps.

All of which makes one think that if you’re going to do retina,-like you do retina. You do 2x, not some halfway house that works badly. How is the goal of “better looking text” served by having apps with a weird mish-mash of small and large fonts?

Oh don’t be stupid.
A technological decision this important requires Rock Paper Scissors Lizard Spock!

“I’d go with the motives of RIM, MOTO, Nokia over the carriers any day of the week”

Right…
Because the history of the past five years is of Apple caving in to ever last demand of the carriers, while brave RIM, MOTO and Nokia valiantly refused to go along…

Look, if the carriers AND Apple agree on it, I think that’s a pretty strong indication that it’s both technically sound and politically feasible.

On the other hand, Safari on OSX does offer inline spell-checking…

I agree that skeuomorphism is awful; but I’m curious as to why you think it is prevalent all over OSX and iOS.

It’s obvious in the (pretty universally reviled) OSX Calendar app and Address Book; and there’s a trace of it in the 90’s LCD display of iTunes which I could do without, but apart from those, in OSX?
Likewise I guess the iris displayed while the iOS camera app loads and takes a pic is skeuomorphic, but some animation makes sense, and that one’s as good as any.

I’m as happy as anyone to criticize real problems in iOS/OSX, but I just don’t see this as a real problem.

Oh my, you poor naive little flower.
You do understand that when Verizon issues press releases, their goal is to achieve some business end, not to increase the content of reliable information in the world?
In this particular case, if Verizon (where greater than 50% of the smartphones sold are iPhones) thought they were getting such a terrible deal, they could simply stop selling them (aka the T-Mobile strategy to getting rich).

Let’s get honest here instead of behaving like idiot eight-year olds. Apple has the advantage because they have a product people actually want. Verizon have buggerall advantage because they have done nothing special with their network over the past few years - yes it’s marginally better than ATT’s but that’s pretty much all you can say. VZW doesn’t like being powerless, so they try to cope with this by shooting smack about Apple every occasion they can.
Do you do realize it’s your choice, as an intelligent human being, to simply ignore whatever idiot complaint they’re making today? It’ll be replaced by some new complaint tomorrow, and so until either (oh please god let it happen soon) either MS, Apple or Google take control of a full cell network. This is the way fat and lazy incumbents are - they spend their lives whining about how unfair it is that they have to compete. You don’t believe this idiocy when it comes from the RIAA or the MPAA, so why are you so willing to accept it when it comes from ZVW?

“Automakers don’t sue each other over stupid shit like this, so why should Apple be able to?
… Is Ford suing everyone in the world who’s using a manufacturing line? NO.”

NOW they are not. Because manufacturing lines are no longer cutting edge.
If you think the early history of American autos (or American aviation, or American radios, or anything else) didn’t involve massive numbers of lawsuits over precisely this sort of thing - appearances, ways of doing things, and so on - then you are extremely ignorant.

As for today: "For example, one interesting area involves design patents, which are patents on the ornamental, non-functional design of an article of manufacture. Studies have reported that automakers are increasingly obtaining design patents on auto parts such as "collision repair parts," including bumper covers, headlamps, door shells, hoods and the like, with a dramatic increase in the number of such patents issuing beginning in 2005.

Automakers such as Ford have initiated suits against aftermarket manufacturers and sellers of such parts for design patent infringement, including in the International Trade Commission (ITC), seeking to stop the importation and sale of allegedly infringing products in the United States."

Oh my - lawsuits about design patents involving Ford? Say it isn’t so!

Oh don’t be an idiot. What was patented was not a particular visual effect so much as the idea of using a visual effect to show that scrolling material has reached its end. It has nothing to do with painting cars in color.

If this was so obvious an idea, then how come neither Windows nor Mac OS X ever used it?

If it is so unimportant an idea, then why didn’t Samsung just ignore it rather than risk the hassle of trying to copy it in a non-infringing way?