This part: > In the years that have passed since then, the Mac has > indeed been on a steady march toward the functional ideal > embodied by the iPad,

This part: > In the years that have passed since then, the Mac has > indeed been on a steady march toward the functional ideal > embodied by the iPad, a product that is arguably the > culmination of Jobs' original vision of personal computing concerns me quite a bit. We all know Jobs' original vision of personal computing was a tightly locked-down walled garden, and I can't help but think that inching towards this destination is inevitably a change for the worse. Think about it. With the drop of the non-Retina display MacBook Pros today, no Macs are now officially user-upgradeable. What was the reason given? 2mm in thickness. Two. Fucking. Millimeters, so you can stare at the edge of your laptop with a hard-on. Oh, and that absurdly high resolution display that you'll need a goddamned loupe to appreciate. All kernel extensions now must be signed in Mavericks. OS features brought about in Lion still bug me, like the absolutely back-asswards autosave system that uses duplication, and the lack of direct manipulation while scrolling. Also, Gatekeeper is a huge uh-oh. It's the reason why my MacBook is now sitting in a closet, and why I'm using a 2005 Toshiba Tecra with Debian on it. Amazing how Linux news has gotten so rare these days... but stick an Apple sticker on something and it shoots to the top of the front page. Sad.