To "nerf" means to weaken or make less dangerous. Google's forced obsolescence of Nexus devices is clearly making the devices weaker and less capable than they can be. I think the use of the word "nerf" was accurate and justified in this case.
That's very disingenuous. Amazon, PayPal and Google rely on selling your data and selling you products based on your data to make money. Visa, Mastercard and Amex mostly rely on transaction processing fees, and make extra money on the data processing in a very limited way.
What Apple are doing is removing the middleman, purely making this about transactions, not data. This means they're avoiding selling private information as a revenue stream.
So not sharing your private information by default, is fundamental to your freedom. That's why we should all care, and why this is a great decision by Apple.
Why didn't the team just bolt together off-the-shelf DSLRs for this?
It seems like a lot of the low level problems were already solved by commercial camera makers many years before.
Even today with the R7, why not just bolt together Gopros and manually set the Aperture, ISO and shutter speed. You'd get better quality images, waterproof cameras and they'd be significantly cheaper.
It's a shame to see a talented engineer distort the truth about Wifi packet collection, especially after Google were shown to have acted deliberatly (rather than "a single wrong line in the configuration file") source: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/new...
On the iPhone 5, iOS 8 performance is brilliant, which it needs to be, because Apple are still selling the iPhone 5C.
When I see the Nexus 4 in public now, it's effectively a crippled phone.
With Apple you're getting 1-2 years extra, which probably makes it worth it over the lifetime of the device.