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karmadave said:

Apple can't sell enough monitors to make a decent business with them. That's because Apple monitors are only designed to work with Apple products. Better they should work with several monitor manufactures to support the features of their new Macs such as USB-C/3.1/Thunderbolt. Focus, focus, focus!

Just because the previous Apple monitor was designed to work only with Apple computers, does not mean they have to continue that trend. Their routers, phones, beats headphones, and Apple TV are not exclusive to Mac users. 

A company any with as much cash as Apple does not have a focus issue. They sell an ecosystem of things that just work together. If they only make consumer laptops and iPhones, then it is not an ecosystem anymore. 

I think a magsafe usb-c connector would be a bad idea, unless it is only used for power. Losing the power on a battery powered laptop for a minute is not a problem. Losing a data connection while you are connected to a network, external drive, or blu-ray burner can be a problem. 

spice-boy said:

The joke my ultimately upon the consumer since an a la carte pick of networks my add up to the same if not more than the current cable providers are asking. 

Anyone who watches a lot of sports and wants to be able to see any show on any network will not benefit much from these packages. There could be benefits like a better interface, better queues and recommendation, and second screen or data overlay.  

The biggest benefit is for people that occasionally watch TV and are not too picky about which shows they watch and when they watch them. Ideally though it is not an a la carte pick of networks, but rather an a la carte pick of genres or even individual shows.

I think it is a great idea to integrate home automation when a house is built, but saying that it only costs pennies per month is very misleading. Even with a 30 year 4% mortgage, the monthly payment for the $2000 loan will be $9.55. Since this technology is new, it will probably be outdated in 5 years, so it should really be amortized in 5 years. The monthly payment would then be be $36.83. That is more than a few pennies. 

Even though Spotify's approach is petty, I really don't like the idea of music streaming services having exclusives. - For TV streaming it is somewhat annoying not to have all content in one app because you need to switch apps and maintain multiple watch lists, but since each show is half an hour and watching TV is something you are actively engaged in it is acceptable. - For games, I'll just skip the games that are on another console. Some people and up buying multiple game consoles for the exclusives. - For music streaming, it only works if all songs that I want to listen to are in one playlist. If each streaming service has exclusives, then we all end up having to subscribe to multiple streaming services and have to switch apps after each song. I'll go back to buying and ripping CDs if that happens.