An aside, I know as an American that I'm jealous of the cooler looking, more advanced cell phones available in Europe. There are ways we can use/get them but it usually involves a highly inflated purchase cost, excessive shipping amount which is subject to a possible customs inspection unless you have a "mule" willing to sneak it in the country inside their rectum. :rolleyes:

I keep trying to talk myself into a MacBook Pro but in addition to all the things you listed, there is one more travel-related issue. There is not, to my knowledge, any available airliner power port adapter with a MagSafe plug on the end of it, yet. I have a nice Kensington universal power adapter that I can use on planes, in a car, or on AC with my G4 or G3 PowerBook, but with the MacBook my "just one adapter to carry" is worthless.

Follow the money . . .
 

Well, that's right. :) The overwhelming majority of people live in urban areas, however, so your later point about people per square mile doesn't work out when considering DSL services for rural areas, where 60 million Americans still live (on about 3.5 million square miles). There's only so many accounts a provider can sell in rural areas, and it's simply not cost effective to put up a central office every few thousand feet or so. Same goes for providing hi-speed cable. If providers could make money selling these services, I'm sure they'd do so. Apart from some kind of grants or government subsidies to providers, it's just not likely to happen.

Edit: see http://www.demographia.com/db-usa-staterural.htm for how many people per square mile it works out to be in some states.

A small minority, yes. Apple has always been the leader in ridding computers of legacy ports that most people don't need. I'm an extremely heavy user of computing and technology as well as a business traveler, and haven't missed either of those at all. I can *imagine* situations where I might, they're just not things I run into in real life. YMMV

As far as population density, I think one issue here is that the density varies greatly. I can take a 20 minute drive from very low density rural homes to high rise buildings downtown. In the more dense areas it's easy to find wi-fi, even city-provided in large areas. In the most rural areas sometimes you can't get any sort of high speed residential access, yet in many cases a few public wi-fi spots still exist.

As far as power, I agree that I would really like a universal power adapter, but until it exists, Kensington has a nice ultra-small inverter that you can pair up with the AC adapter. Not ideal, but livable.

Yep. 'Dunno how I forgot that. Most Apple laptop batteries are already down to well under 2-hours of life in the first year. My power adapter is invaluable.

I've never seen an Apple laptop lose more than about 8% capacity in the first year. I'm guessing people who do lose more than that are either abusing them or just using them on battery every single day, which of course would cause this issue. Apple will replace batteries in the first year if they lose a substantial amount of capacity.

I've been through this with Apple several times: The battery has to be down under 1 hour in the first year for them to even consider replacing it.

.
I’m curious: With recent/upcoming strides in battery technology, and the reduced power consumption on Intel chips much touted by Apple, are we going to see any radical lengthening of battery life? I would like to see a reliable 8-12 hours.

Not likely, unless we go to fuel cells. There really are no expected advances in batteries. The general consensus is that we've gone about as far as we can with that technology.

The CPUs use less power for a given speed, but the speed continues to climb, so basically you get more speed for the same power. The only low-power processors on the market are things like the Transmeta Crusoe, which isn't popular.

I’m curious -- which do you have in mind?
And if you could purchase a cell phone with a credit card volunteered by, say Steve Ballmer, which one would you get?

Hmm, all the cell phones I used to want are available statewide. At the ones i was able to look up. The only one I didn't find is the Nokia used in the film Swordfish. The US version wasn't spring loaded. Perhaps things have changed or perhaps my perception was off, but I'll keep on looking.

To answer your question about a volunteered CC, I'd have to go with this one. Notice the one-button concierge service (I assume it's like On-Star).

My previous phone was EU-only for a while, but no matter, I picked it up on eBay. It seems to go in cycles; right now the US carriers all have the hottest new PDA phone, and occasionally we get one first.

Storage capacity for any type of energy has always been a problem. Look at those trying to store "green energy." Things like wind farms and solar panels fluctuate far too much to call it a reliable source, but when it does work, it works great because it pumps energy right into the grib for immediate use. But whats done with the energy that isnt used? Well its a problem and hopefully something can come from some research.