And now a reply post.


I only would do this when the iPhone was in a car mount, and I was using it for GPS. I don't actively text while driving, but being able to read incoming messages even at a glance allow me to know if it's time to pull over to respond to something immediately, or keep going. Such is the life of being on call. Thankfully now that the new system isn't modal, I don't have to touch the phone at all to resume viewing my GPS route info.


I'm not going to say much here since I am technically covered by a Lion NDA, but I do agree with your checking out part. My personal opinion is that Apple won't likely kill off the under the hood power user stuff anytime soon, especially with their continued interest in the high end video production market. Final Cut X was a good reassurance that Apple has some stake planted in the pro field still. I do see them slowly moving the defaults of the system to be more and more consumer friendly, based on what they learn from the iOS side. The iCloud document syncing for Pages, the auto save, and versioning all speak of features for general consumers to make the experience easier, but at the same time adds some tools for power users. I already have used Time Machine as a sort of VCS feature for a few things, having it baked in properly will be even better. I can even see a day where Apple disallows installing apps except from the App Store, but there will likely be a setting somewhere to turn this restriction off. Out of the box the common consumer will likely not care, and they will benefit too since this closes the malware problem off (well, mostly, I know no system can ever be 100% secure). And for those of us who care, we have one switch to flip. Similar to side loading applications on Android today. Default is off, but it's in there to turn on.


As for the 256kb AAC part, I really don't care (though I understand others do). To me, they sound just the same as 320kbit MP3 (my old standard). At least the "upgrade" isn't going to transcode your existing files into the AAC 256kbit file, instead it's just a copy of their AAC created from (in theory) a master lossless source. With my collection, I'm expecting a lot to not match, as I have a lot of odd music in my collection that has never really been sold directly. Things like soundtracks ripped from games back when they used CD Audio and such. The lack of streaming though does seem odd to me.