Aha! You know, I constantly miss the forest for the trees these days, but this comment brought to mind the overall issue at play here:

We're living in a world divided radically between Order and Chaos.

Apple has perfected Order. They fully control their own hardware and software, but have leveraged that control to create a deep, friendly, and powerful environment for consumers.

On the other side, the GNU project has unleashed Chaos. By striving (almost fanatically in my opinion) to make all source code open, and providing all the legal infrastructure for coders to write software that stays open, significant software products have been designed, built, and maintained almost entirely outside of the corporate world.

Of course, neither of these two extremes can really succeed on their own. GNU was going nowhere fast until Linus Torvalds released a small, conventional, and easily ported OS that served as the underlying infrastructure for working with open-source code on many platforms. (And his highly-ordered control of Linux has kept it together as competing free OS options continue to fall apart.)

And Apple's deep and rich user experience takes enormous effort and long lead-times to manage; which is why their most successful products have always been improvements on products that existed before. The iPod was just a souped-up MP3 player; the iPhone was just an improved cell phone; the iPad, something of a supersized combination of the iPod and iPhone...

Anyway, rambling on here. Sure, right now Order has the upper hand, and Chaos is falling behind. But I think anybody with a clear eye can see that Apple is hitting something of a wall right now. The Mac line has been stagnant for years; the iPod almost gone; the iPhone and iPad continue to make evolutionary rather than revolutionary progress. And their latest innovation? A watch?

The "failure" of open-source software is, in my opinion, not actually a failure; it is instead a measure of the great success of closed-source software in the last few years. I applaud that success, but I doubt it can continue forever. Corporations inevitably rise and fall, and in the past, software tied inextricably to those corporations ends up failing along with those who own it. In the end, only open-source software survives.

Gah, hope I haven't bored everyone to tears. Now back to your regularly scheduled commentary about horribly overpriced orphan tablets.