Okay, hold on a sec. Apple is not a progressive company.

Sure Tim Cook seems to be a much cooler(even tempered) guy than Steve Jobs, but Apple is no where near being a progressive company. Apple's continued use of child and/or slave labor--although to be fair, Apple has done better over the last year to cut ties with manufacturers in their supply chain that continue such egregious practices, but lots more remains to be done. Much of the gains are only brought to light by Apple's inventorying, so please bear that in mind.

As someone that has been to some assembly facilities, the practice seems very, very widespread.

It is not that Apple is less progressive than other technology giants, it is that it is no better. Why people want to believe that Apple is better is due to a lack of rationed perspective.

Apple's stateside feel good policies cannot make up for their across the oceans lack of oversight. There. Not all Apple users are mindless acolytes, but many appear to be just that.

I am going to run with theme just a bit longer..

Back in 1997, when Microsoft saved Apple from almost certain bankruptcy, I had a printing company executive tell me how much faster his Macs were than my Intel boxes. So, I brought in my shiny new Slot-1 PII 400MHz with the new 100MHz bus on a BX chipset in April of 1998 to benchmark against his Mac. I think I paid 1500USD in parts for the whole mess; including a legit Windows 98 disk. I was trying to overclock using a TEC and raising the FSB. I got some good ram and the box was rock stable at 486MHz. It took forever to get to the speed. Well, a couple of weeks worth of work at any rate. The box was really fast for those days. I let the Mac guy use all Photoshop benchmarks and my box which had an up to the second video card(AGP, no less) smoked his 5000USD Apple in every benchmark.

I could have done a better job of overclocking with a PGA Celeron, but the PII 486 was pretty fast in its day. Those early Deschutes core processors did not overclock at all.

On a sadder note, I once left the TEC powered with the CPU unpowered. It froze. I still used that box with Win 98 SE to test 9x kernel software right through to 2006. If I did not cook the motherboard's system bus by overvolting a bunch of stuff, I would likely still have it today. I stopped using TECs after that. They are terrific sub-ambient cooling devices, but today's processors are plenty fast out of the box.

Ahh, a trip down silicon memory lane.

People that are fanatical about things as meaningless as technology products really need to get out more. Seriously.

Oh, and Steve Jobs was a visionary of sorts, just not as great as legend as made him out to be. If you really want to see who the movers and shakers were in the development of the personal computing were, see The Innovators. While author Isaacson leaves out much of the contributions Xerox PARC computer scientists made, it is a pretty good read. One book cannot cover a revolution that is perhaps now just being made, but as an overview, it is acceptably good. The book gets too much praise--like most every popular treatment of a subject--from people not in the field. Not a word about Bill Joy. That is a crime.