"Can you speak or read French?" I piped up from a few seats over – much to the amusement of his friends. Much mocking of the poor kid occurred for the rest of that train trip, as I sat in silence, not knowing my long career of knocking an Apple cultist down a peg was just beginning.

[This of course is only here for comedic effect, I routinely use Mac's for my day-to-day work. My day is fairly evenly split between Windows, Linux and Mac OS (with others thrown in less often) and I have no strong feelings one way or another about the people that use either PC or Mac (or even Android v iPhone nutters) – as long as you aren't a dick about it.]

Oh, but the [***] is an entirely new concept, you can't deny that!
I can - and will.

Let's do this one quickfire...

iPad and Siri: Star Trek, while fictional, did both first and any technological advances are almost certainly based on real-word emerging technology – asking the computer a question and getting a response was never a new concept by the time Siri rolled around, speech recognition software has been around since forever. The iPad style form factor of the portable computers in Next Generation was also the direct influence for the eventual product.

Oh and once again, Microsoft had already beaten them to the market (by years) with the Tablet PC format (although not quite the non-descript slab of glass tablets eventually became to be known as, this is another case of iteration over innovation). It appears Microsoft has come full-circle on the tablet concept after they never really took off. The Surface series is a mighty fine extension of something that I was quite fond of to begin with - those futuristic tablet/laptop computers on Stargate that seemed to be able to do everything a normal computer could.