luxuriant

You seem to need a laptop.

You're almost selling the A7 short by not explicitly mentioning that, when it duly shipped — on time — its performance trounced the competitors that the naysayers had been boosting, particularly in single-core and browsing performance, where it opened up a lead that Apple holds to this day. Multicore, with just two cores, and graphics beat pretty much all-comers at release, holding that crown for a good year. See, for example, https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/09/review-with-the-iphone-5s-apple-lays-groundwork-for-a-brighter-future/3/ for comparative performance at release, and https://www.anandtech.com/show/9102/the-htc-one-m9-review-part-1/5 a year and a half later, when Android devices were finally catching up — although, by that time, the (larger!) target was the iPhone 6, not the 5S.

Looking at the specs, its brightness is just 200 nits. Despite the impressive contrast delivered by its VA panel, it can't do much with HDR if that's all the brightness it can manage. I'd be interested in a much higher spec monitor with all these bells and whisles but not, I'm afraid, in this offering.

Not a "Pro" feature at all, but related to the "Apple Watch integration" theme: LET ME SEE MY HEALTH AND WORKOUT DATA ON MY iPAD!

But wait! there's more:

• Access to over 100,000 new music stations from iHeartRadio, radio.com and TuneIn.

• Sleep timer.

The lack of those meant there was no way I would buy a HomePod. Mind, I probably won't even now, unless I get even more annoyed at Sonos' incessant content-free updates than I am now. 

When I pull my iPhone out of my pocket, by the time I look at the screen, it's unlocked because I put my finger on the home button when when I grabbed the phone. When my iPhone's on the nightstand, I can easily unlock it with touch ID in the dark. Both scenarios are a fail for facial recognition.

Not just iPhones: also seen from a Mac this morning.

Always great to read your thoughts, Daniel. But the tldr; is simply to apply Betteridge's Law of Headlines:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines

I understood that Apple's implementation of RCS won't initially do E2E encryption, as it's not part of the official standard, but, rather, a Google-proprietary add-on for Android. Apple says it will work to get some form of E2E encryption (maybe not Google's) into the standard, at which point it will implement it. If my information's out-of-date or incorrect, please put me right!

My guess is that Apple is shying away from the copyright issues: they got burned once for copying the Swiss Railway Clock (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_railway_clock), and don't want to be led there again by third parties.